I'm playing through all of Final Fantasy, and everyone is invited (Playing Lightning Returns now)

[Issun]

I'm on FF4 now, and I was going to say something, but all I have to say about it is that nothing in this world hits all my nostalgia buttons like FF4. Every time I play it it's like I'm 13 and on spring break without a care in the world.

 

[FelixSH]

FWIW, I recommend this. I found that, when I was willing to give each job a chance, there was only one job in the entire game that didn't impress me in some way or have some niche use.

Yeah, up to now (trying some Water Jobs now), no job was a disappointment. They are all useful.

Red Mages are best in the early game. You get an early Red Mage exclusive weapon (Wight Slayer, IIRC?) that makes having exactly one really useful at that point.

I think you are supposed to get that thing immediately, for the dungeon with the Djinn? I got in there, was overwhelmed, and got the Wightslayer afterwards. The damage just wasn't impressive. So, as is my experience with Red Mages, I just don't like them that much.

Yeah, as always, the internet is wrong. Scholars are great! During this point of the game, my Scholar was as beefy as my Knight. I think the issue is that folks don't explore enough? If you miss the Dwarf trove *and* the locked key door, then you don't have much gear for your Scholar, and the class is our course much worse without the free loot that the game hands you multiple copies of.

I can understand missing the locked key door, but I think one of the dwarfs explicitely tells you to get their treasure? Or at least, you just need to look there, the big rock is gone, go get the stuff. But maybe it's just a case of games leading you better in more modern games. Back in the day, players would likely not have missed that.

Honestly, it's a shame that this game never came out here. I enjoyed my time with FF I and II, but III feels so much smoother and better to play. Monsters aren't (just) dangerous, because of their horrible status ailments (here, have nine zombies who can all paralize you with one hit, or do you prefer these jerks with their instant-death attacks/spells?), but because their damage output actually is adjusted to the level you are probably at, at the moment.

Before starting, I read a bunch of times that FF III is supposed to be hard. I have no idea why people say that. In some cases, monsters are a bit stronger than I would expect them (the Tower of Owen comes to mind), but in general, damage gets spread out, so with some luck, no one will die. The bosses can be dangerous (the guy who wanted the Fire Crystal was pretty intense), and I lose some of my guys, but I still beat every boss at the first try. Hein is a jerk, but with a party of Black Mages and Scholars, he shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Dunno, maybe I was just lucky, but the jobs are all useful and, if you fight every battle, you will likely be in the sweet spot where battles are not horribly hard, but also not totally trivial.

Anyway, I played some more.

---------------------------------------------------

Last time, I just had gotten the airship and left the floating continent. It is pretty cool, that you are greeted by this endless ocean. I would have appreciated some land, to guide you. I had a savestate on land, before going down, and I needed it, because the first time I just didn't find any land mass. I guess it is just a matter of time, so I might have been unlucky. But just getting back to the floating continent is pretty hard. Gnome Bread helps, but it only shows you a small part of the map, instead of the whole world.

Anyway, the second try worked better, and I reached a bit of land with a temple and a cave. In the temple, there was a piece of the Water Crystal, which I was not able to touch. It said, that only Aria could touch it. The cave wasn't much better, blocking my way pretty soon.

At this point, I consulted an online map, because I was not motivated to lose my way completely again. Thankfully, you just have to fly North, a bit to the West though, to find a wrecked ship. Inside is an old man, the captain and only survivor of the flood. The earthquake that started our adventure made the world drown. There is also a girl in his bed, who he found, floating on a piece of wood. You need to give her a potion.

It's, of course, Aria. She is the priestess of the Temple of Water, and joins us. So, we get back to the Temple and get the Shard. With that, Aria is able to open the way in the Cave of Tides (the one, where I was blocked before).

It's a simple dungeon with some dead ends. Not a big deal, but I wished there had been at least some treasure. Oh well. Elsewise, there isn't much to say, it wasn't a particularly special place. So, we soon find the Water Crystal, and Aria attaches the missing shard.

But! Just when she is finished, a weird guy appears and shoots an arrow at us. Aria sacrifices herself and pushes us out of the way, dying in the process. The assassin is Kraken(!), who also mentiones Xande, and we fight him. Not a particularly interesting fight either, except that his attacks were pretty strong. But he also went down soon, so no big deal.

Another tragic scene happens, where Kirk didn't want to leave Aria here. FF III is still rather minimalistic, they still hadn't figured out that you might add a few more scenes between the characters. It's clear here, that Kirk got very attached to Aria, and the game treats it as such here. Like with Desch, sad music plays, and we give our characters some time to grieve. But then, the cave falls in, and I guess the Crystal teleports us outside. We were supposed to go, but Kirk didn't want to leave Aria behind.

I know that IV does this stuff better, but FF II and III both did the whole thing already, were characters would join your party, only to die. It is effective, more here than in II, and even moreso in IV. Except that there, no one dies, and I don't understand why. But we'll get there later. For now, I'm really surprised how much DNA these games shared, at least in that specific regard. FF III doesn't have that much story, but they really tried with these guests.

We see the world reemerge out of the sea, and wake up in an inn. We are informed, that we were asleep for three days, and that the people here never realized, that they had been turned to stone, and waited on the ground of the ocean.

The inn is one of the bigger ones, and has a bar attached. In that bar, there is a piano, where we can now play a good song, and everyone is so thrilled by it that the whole rooms starts to dance. It's pretty great and fun!

We also learn about a jerk named Goldor, who chained our ship to the ground. So, before we can continue, we have to unchain our ship! He is, of course, I greedy guy who loves gold, and is supposed to be immune to magic. I wouldn't know, as I still have no spell caster in my party.

His mansion is in the south, but it is protected by a swamp or something, which we need some special shoes to get over. Someone named Gill is supposed to know about them.

When we are told this, we are overheared by four old men, who are actually pretty great. They think that they are the four Heroes of Light, and will try to find the shoes themselves. We soon find Gill, and he tells us that someone named Delilah, who lives in the sewers, has them. He also has the keys to the sewers, and opens them up for us.

But before we go, I had a look at the jobs. When walking through the water, we find a part of land, where there lies thief equipment in the grass. The shop also has boomerangs. And with these things, the thief suddenly becomes a total monster.

Considering that the game clearly wants us to use the thief, I didn't change Sisko to anything else. Kirk becomes a Viking, which is the next pure fighter. Not much to say about them, except that they hit brutally hard.

Janewe stops being an archer, and becomes a Karateka, or whatever the name is. Basically, the advanced Monk. And, again, it's a simple class that hits super hard. Just really, really hard. More than the Viking. The archer was a great, fun class, and would continue to be useful, but for now, I wanted to try out other ones.

But that's it, for now. There are still other jobs, like the Mystic Knight and the Dragoon (which I will just use when the game expects me to), the Bard, the Geomancer and the Evoker.

None of these can buy new equipment here. I actually wanted to turn someone into a Geomancer, but without the correct equipment, that seemed foolish. And the only one left to switch was Picard the Scholar, who would be fine for a bit longer.

The sewers were really easy. The new jobs are super strong, the Karateka found a new weapon in here (a catclaw), and I also found two new knives for the Thief (which made his boomerangs immediately useless. Oh well. And at this point, the thief suddenly became the main damage dealer of my group.

That dungeon wasn't particularly interesting either. It was short, though. Oh, and I guess it's the first sewer dungeon in FF history! For that, it's surprisingly nice.

In the middle, we find the four old men, who think they are the Heroes of Light. Except that they are surrounded by regular Goblins, which we swiftly take care of. They thank us, and accept that WE are the actual Heroes of Light. But that's not all. Soon, we reach the endpoint of the dungeon and meet Delilah. Instead of giving us the shoes, she throws one at us. An exploding shoe. We are saved from damage though. The old men come in, and tell her that we are the Heroes.

It's actually a cute scene, where this old woman who lives alone in a monster-ridden sewer, accepts the words of these old guys (they are obviously friends), and helps us. That alone probably makes this one of the best sewer dungeons ever.

It's just another bit of playfulness and fun in a game full of this stuff. Really nice bit of levity, after the sad death of a friend.

Now that we have the shoes, we can already go and meet Goldor. I think I didn't mention, that Goldor also has the Earth Crystal, the last one. Considering that we learned that the Earth Crystal was responsible for drowning all the land, it seems to have been Goldor who did this. The game doesn't say anything else about it, but there it is. Maybe he had gone crazy with power?

The way to the mansion isn't particularly interesting, but the mansion itself is a fine, little dungeon. There is a big room, with four smaller rooms. Here, it comes in handy that we have a thief, as all the doors are locked. But it seems like they are all empty.

At the end of the big hall, there are stairs up, which lead to a bunch of treasure chests, full with Gold Swords, which are completely useless, except for producing a pretty good price when sold.

But this floor is also a dead end. But if you looked carefully in the smaller rooms at the start, you see a hidden walkway in one of them. It leads to another hall, which ends in a room with Goldor himself. As I said, pretty easy dungeon.

It is fun, though, that all the monsters in here are golden in some way. The soldiers are dressed in gold armor, and the bears are goldbears. Nothing problematic, again.

Goldor is another boss that isn't too hard. Sorry, I wished I could say something interesting about them, but they are all very samey. Hit pretty hard (two hits would kill someone), but none do anything special. They are just damage races. Which is fine, it's still fun.

The interesting bit happens, when Goldor is defeated. Despite playing this game three times already, I had forgotten that this jerk destroys the Earth Crystal. I expected that I would not get it, considering that I just had gotten the Water Crystal, but I didn't expect it to get destroyed. Well, that makes things more complicated.

He soon dies, and leaves a magical key behind. The key vanishes, when we touch it, and our ship is released. And with that, we are finally free to explore the full world. Well, more or less.

I didn't do much more. I found Replito, the town where summoners live. There is a cute scene, were a young summoner tries a summon, but it is only Chocobo. A shop sells the first five Summon spells, and we learn about the strongest summoned monsters, Leviathan and Bahamut. I guess you can also buy equipment for the Ewoker here. Noah is mentioned for the first time, he seems to have sealed Leviathan and Bahamut away.

I also found Duster, city of Geomancers and Bards. I will, for now, keep my thief, and I already changed someone to a Viking, and someone to a Karateka. So, that left only Picard the Scholar. I was more curious for the Geomancer, and if their magic was useful, so I changed him to that. Maybe he will become a Bard soon. Would probably fit the party well, I think they can freely raise the strength of the party? We'll see. Here, we can at least buy equipment for both jobs.

The last thing I found was a place called Uneis shrine. Unei herself was sleeping, but her parrot tld us, that she would never wake up, because she was guarding the Dream World.

Well, that's it for now. I already found that weird city that will shoot us down, and force us to become Dragoons, so I guess that's next. *Sigh* I'm not really looking forward to Garuda.

 

[Destil]

FFIII can be hard in unfair, arbitrary, annoying ways. Namely Garuda.

There are some dungeons later that are supposed to be hard but "use magic" and "use your new jobs" makes them pretty manageable.

 

[gorha]

So having checked out the eastern part of the sea, I went west to find the next major destination in the story, Dwarven Hollow. The dwarves who live here say lali-ho, starting a minor series tradition. Gulgan Gulch shows that the localization isn't above wordplay in town names, so this place not being called Lali-Hollow seems like a missed opportunity. Anyway, the dwarves here have two Horns of Ice in a little shrine that's protected by an invisible barrier. Gutsco the Rogue (that's how he's referred to several times, including in his own dialogue boxes) somehow got past the barrier and stole one of the horns. Gutsco escaped through an underground lake, and dwarves can't swim, so they ask us to go after him. We can't swim either, though; only frogs can do that. So, it's Toad time again.

The lake is just in a room in Dwarven Hollow, not a separate location on the world map or anything. There's a short scene before entering the dungeon where Luneth is enthusiastic about turning into frogs again to get in, while Refia is dismayed at the prospect.

This cave is a lot shorter and easier than the Tower of Owen. The monsters here all resist fire and are weak to ice. I had picked up an Ice Staff somewhere, I think in one of the locked rooms in castle Argus, and that can cast Blizzard for free to kill pretty much any enemy in this dungeon. Luneth ends up holding the staff while Arc uses his level 1 charges to cast Blizzard, since he has lots of them by now. At the end we find Gutsco. He has wings in this version, and a loincloth that's held up by his snake. He double acts, usually uses physical attacks, and occasionally casts Mini. Once he cast it on Luneth and then punched him for around 160 damage; if he'd been in the front row, or if the attack had crit, he would've died. The other times Gutsco used Mini, it missed. This fight went more smoothly than Medusa, but could've been rough with bad luck.

After defeating him, something that looks like the shadow cast by your party leader appears behind you. It looked a bit glitchy in the boss room, but normal back in Dwarven Hollow. I tried pressing square to see if there would be a guest character scene with the shadow, but nothing happened. The guard at the shrine lowers the barrier so we can return the stolen horn, rather than taking it himself. Once we enter, the shadow reveals itself to be Gutsco, who steals both horns and flees to the cave to the north, which is where the fire crystal is. The horns are needed to enter; presumably, there would've been something stopping me from getting into this cave earlier, but I didn't go there to see.

So let's review Gutsco's evil plan. His goal was to get the power of the fire crystal, and to reach it, he needed the two horns of ice. He was able to get into the shrine where they were kept, somehow, and stole one but left the other behind. Then he escaped into a cave with no way out except to go back through Dwarven Hollow, and waited until some heroes who could turn into frogs came to kill him, so he could disguise himself as their shadow and get back into the shrine to steal the other horn once those heroes went there to return the first one. The shrine which, to reiterate, he had already gotten into once before, when there weren't a group of people right there who had already shown they were willing and able to kill him. His plan fails if nobody turns into frogs to go after him, it fails if the guard takes the horn and puts it back in the shrine himself, and it fails if we kill him again when he pops out. He doesn't look like a Gurgan, but he must be to have known that this would work.

But his plan also fails if we chase him down and kill him in the fire crystal cave, and that's what we're going to do. This is quite a tough dungeon. Lava does hurt you in this version, taking 10 HP from everyone roughly every second we're on it, even while standing still. Unlike in FF1, encounters still happen on lava; adding insult to injury, loading time after a battle is enough to take a tick of lava damage. The monsters here include the ones from the previous cave and several new ones, including that green bomb and red pudding. The pudding still looks great, and its idle animation in the remake has it waving its arms around. I was ready to get killed by exploding bombs, but they never did explode. Adamantoises appear on the lower floors, too; they're palette swaps of the Land Turtle from the wind crystal cave. The enemies aren't too dangerous on their own, but they do enough damage that I couldn't just run around at low HP, so I had to heal up from the lava frequently and ended up running through most of Luneth's Cure spells on the way to the boss.

The boss is Gutsco again, but this time he turns into Salamander, a . He hits really hard with physical attacks, and only takes a little over 100 damage from Blizzard, but around 800 from Blizzara. After Arc ran out of level 3 charges, I started using Antarctic Winds. When he was almost dead, Salamander used fire breath. Luneth and Refia took a lot of damage but survived because their armor gave some fire protection, but it killed Arc and Ingus. Fortunately, the boss died later that round.

The fire crystal gives us four new jobs, and I'm using all of them:

Knight is not quite a straight upgrade of Warrior, being unable to use axes or bows, but they can use level 1 white magic badly, healing less than 100 HP with Cure. They have great attack and defense due to Knight-only equipment that becomes available now and in the next dungeon. Also, they have a Defend command that seems to reduce damage taken for the whole party, which is very nice. Luneth went from Red Mage to Knight, since he was rarely casting anything but Cure anymore anyway.

Ranger can only use bows, and they can use the elemental arrows that have been available for a while now, which Warrior can't. The listed attack power is pretty low compared to dual-wielding swords, but the damage is comparable, and works from the back row. Their skill is Barrage, which hits random enemies multiple times, kind of like Sshot or X-Fight in the SNES FF games, and I think it consumes multiple arrows to do it. Refia went from Warrior to Ranger.

Scholar is... well, it's not as bad as some of people make it out to be, but I didn't get nearly as positive an impression of it as Felix and JBear, either. Listed attack power with two books is high, but the damage isn't that impressive. It would probably be strong in the front row, but the armor available to scholars isn't really good enough for them to survive comfortably there. It would be better when hitting a weakness, but nothing in the next dungeon is weak to fire, ice or lightning except the boss. A scholar is pretty much required to beat that boss, but I'm probably not going to stick with this job for much longer after that. On the plus side, Scholar can use level 1 white and black magic, like Freelancer; in the remake, their Study command reveals an enemy's HP and weaknesses in one action; and most importantly, they use items more effectively. Arc went from Black Mage to Scholar.

Geomancer is a glass cannon. They can't wear any good armor at the moment, but their Terrain command is amazing, doing 400-600 damage, often to all enemies, depending on which specific attack they use. Once, it triggered Shadowflare for around 3000. The weapon shop in Dwarven Hollow sells their first weapon, a bell. Physical attacks with two bells are decent, on par with Ranger bow attacks. They'd be even better if they could safely stand in the front row, which they absolutely cannot. The bells were expensive, and Terrain is pretty much always better than Attack so far. Geomancers hold their weapons out when using Terrain, so maybe they affect its power? If not, I probably shouldn't have wasted money on them. This is the most impressive new job regardless. The NPC who tells you what jobs do says that Terrain greatly improves with job level, and it's already pretty awesome, so this job may have a bright future. Ingus went from Monk to Geomancer.

As a side note, thank you Felix and JBear for mentioning the treasure room in Dwarven Hollow; I was totally going to leave without looting it after returning the horns, despite making a mental note of it earlier. There's lots of good stuff there, including a full set of Scholar equipment and some stuff for the Knight and Ranger, though not Geomancer, presumably because the chest contents are the same as in the original, where Geomancer wasn't a fire crystal job. Also, the guard says something like, "I'm going to dwarf-moonwalk down the stairs to the treasure room", and then he does walk downstairs backward. It's a very strange but delightful moment.

As we're leaving, a dying man shows up to tell us that things have gotten even worse in Tokkul, as Hein's soldiers are going to burn it down now that there's nothing left to steal. He also reminds us, as we've heard from someone in Tokkul before, that Scholars can find Hein's weakness. We head over, and are immediately captured as we enter the town. This gets us into the tree that Hein had converted into his flying desert fortress, so we can finally take him on, but we also can't get out of here without beating him. The only way out of our cell is to walk through a wall. There have been many secret passages like that in this game, but this is the first time using one is actually required to progress. I wonder if anyone's ever gotten stuck because of that. Anyway, King Argus and his remaining loyal soldiers are imprisoned here with us, and tell us about the king's awesome sword, which should be in the tree somewhere. In another cell, one of the soldiers turns into a demon and attacks! It's not much of a fight, as demons are just a random enemy in this dungeon anyway, but I guess it shows how quickly the king's soldiers are being corrupted. Past that, there's a dying soldier who gives us yet another free Mini spell, which we need to go through a nearby hole and escape the cells. There's also a convenient pot of healing water, so we can change someone into a White Mage and cast it. Unlike the previous Mini dungeons, this one lets us change back after going through the hole, and we can return here even if we're big. I turn Luneth into the White Mage, then go back to Knight. The king's sword is indeed in the dungeon, found in a chest with no particular fanfare. It's very strong, though. Most enemies in this dungeon are undead or demons, making them weak to light. Despite their names, Light Books and Light Arrows deal lightning damage rather than light, but holy arrows do hit light weakness, so Ranger is pretty solid here as well. Terrain was the real star of the show, though. I had to return to the entrance once because Ingus died, and I was also running low on healing since knights and scholars don't heal for that much. Monsters here are very dangerous; in particular, Dullahans act twice, the first normal enemy to do so.

Hein frequently uses Barrier Shift to become weak to one element and strong against all others. Hein's speed was all over the place, going first one round and last the next, so it was unpredictable what his weakness would be at any given time. Like other bosses, he acts twice, and Barrier Shift only uses one of those actions. His physical attacks were devastating, and he occasionally cast status spells that were mostly a waste of time. He takes low damage from weapons even when they hit his weakness, so a Black Mage would've been great to have here. Terrain again did most of the work, since it could deal damage regardless of his current weakness. When I fought him, Hein shifted his weakness to fire every single time, but Arc had to Study nearly every turn to confirm that. Finally, I had him use a Bomb Fragment, which did over 1500 damage and finished him off. I'll give Scholar credit for making attack items really strong, at least; if they were buyable, the job would be quite good, kind of like a more different Ranger.

Once Hein is defeated, the tree returns to the fairy forest and says that the floating continent was created 1000 years ago, when darkness engulfed the world. It tells us to leave the continent and go to the surface world. We must go now, or the next chance won't come for another 1000 years. The fairies give us the Fang of Wind.

We go back to castle Argus and talk to the king there. He gives us the Wheel of Time, which is somehow used to make an airship. Apparently, he and Cid are old friends. We take the wheel back to Canaan and show it to Cid, who drops a big plot twist: he, and our party members, are not from the floating continent! He was flying his airship, full of passengers, one day ten years ago when it was engulfed by darkness and crash landed on the continent; he and four children were the only survivors, and they ended up being our party members. There's a whole flashback scene showing this. Was this bit in the original? I don't remember it at all. Anyway, Cid also remodels our ship into an airship, so we can leave the floating continent, but there is a sidequest I'm going to take care of first.

So, the remake added a Mognet feature, where a moogle in each town will give you letters from people you've met. Apparently, in the DS version, this was linked to some online feature that's inaccessible now that the DS' online servers have shut down, but on PSP it doesn't have that issue. It seems to be based on plot progression and your party leader at the time you talk to the moogle. Luneth and Arc get letters from Topapa, the elder of Ur; Refia gets them from Takka, the blacksmith in Kazus; Ingus gets them from Princess Sara; and Cid also sends letters, but I don't think they're tied to a particular character. Most of them are just generic greetings along the lines of, "hey, how are you doing, come back and visit some time", and then I do visit and they say the same thing they said an hour ago. But this time, Topapa asks for help; some other kids from Ur, whom we last saw bullying Arc near the beginning of the game, have gone missing and might be in the wind crystal cave. So we go there and find those kids being attacked by a group of bombs. One easy fight later and they give us a crystal shard they found as thanks, which gives us the Onion Knight job! That was right when I had to stop playing, so I haven't seen what Onion Knights can do in this version yet, but I'll check them out next time.

 

[Dracula]

Before starting, I read a bunch of times that FF III is supposed to be hard. I have no idea why people say that. In some cases, monsters are a bit stronger than I would expect them (the Tower of Owen comes to mind), but in general, damage gets spread out, so with some luck, no one will die. The bosses can be dangerous (the guy who wanted the Fire Crystal was pretty intense), and I lose some of my guys, but I still beat every boss at the first try. Hein is a jerk, but with a party of Black Mages and Scholars, he shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Dunno, maybe I was just lucky, but the jobs are all useful and, if you fight every battle, you will likely be in the sweet spot where battles are not horribly hard, but also not totally trivial.

Yeah, this was basically my experience with III - coming from the much rougher I and II, it felt like a very smooth experience. The notorious difficulty is kind of bunched up at the end, though. I won't spoil anything for you, but it'd do you well to mentally prepare for a considerable challenge before you see the credits.

 

[conchobhar]

Still slowly plugging away. I climbed a mountain, met Desch and fled from Bahamut, shrunk down and visited a gnome town, met some vikings, did a whole dungeon as mini and got a boat. Listing it out like that makes it sounds like quite the adventure, but this was maybe an hour of gameplay. Early RPGs move fast, and none of them move faster than Final Fantasy (in my limited experience, anyway).

The mini stuff has been the most interesting and exciting part of the game so far. Not only is it a cool idea (shrink and explore previously unseen and inaccessible areas), but it has its own mechanical twist that highlights the importance and true aim of the job system: rejigger your party as need be for the current challenge. It's a really effective bit of game design, tucking an effective tutorial into a high-concept sequence.

But what I like most is just that it's doing something with Mini in the first place, transforming it from a simple status/spell into something that has purpose and application outside of battle. That's cool! It makes me wonder why something like never really happened in later games… there's using Float to avoid damage tiles, I guess, but that's not quite the same.

Before starting, I read a bunch of times that FF III is supposed to be hard. I have no idea why people say that. In some cases, monsters are a bit stronger than I would expect them (the Tower of Owen comes to mind), but in general, damage gets spread out, so with some luck, no one will die. The bosses can be dangerous (the guy who wanted the Fire Crystal was pretty intense), and I lose some of my guys, but I still beat every boss at the first try. Hein is a jerk, but with a party of Black Mages and Scholars, he shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Wow, this is not my experience at all. I'm finding FF3 really tough, and worse, really punishing. My party members fold easily, and reviving them is such a hassle— having to hoof it back to the nearest town, while my party is down a member, and where fleeing battles is a big risk— that I often just reset. It's a big factor of why I'm playing so slowly. I'm glad you're having an easy time, but man, I wish I had your luck!

 

[FelixSH]

I'm on FF4 now, and I was going to say something, but all I have to say about it is that nothing in this world hits all my nostalgia buttons like FF4. Every time I play it it's like I'm 13 and on spring break without a care in the world.

Don't worry, I will talk about it enough for both of us. I hope you will comment then, though, and tell me about your favourite setpieces when I get to them.

FFIII can be hard in unfair, arbitrary, annoying ways. Namely Garuda.

There are some dungeons later that are supposed to be hard but "use magic" and "use your new jobs" makes them pretty manageable.

Oh yeah, it definitely has it's, uh, moments. I guess these are also the moments that people remember. Especially considering how the game ends.

The dwarves who live here say lali-ho, starting a minor series tradition.

Are they the first? I thought the dwarves in FF I already used that? But I already don't remember.

At the end we find Gutsco. He has wings in this version, and a loincloth that's held up by his snake. He double acts, usually uses physical attacks, and occasionally casts Mini.

The bosses sound actually really hard, compared to the Famicom version. I also vaguely remember that being the case, just because of them attacking twice. Do you find the bosses especially challenging, in general? Compared to the regular enemies?

So let's review Gutsco's evil plan. His goal was to get the power of the fire crystal, and to reach it, he needed the two horns of ice. He was able to get into the shrine where they were kept, somehow, and stole one but left the other behind. Then he escaped into a cave with no way out except to go back through Dwarven Hollow, and waited until some heroes who could turn into frogs came to kill him, so he could disguise himself as their shadow and get back into the shrine to steal the other horn once those heroes went there to return the first one. The shrine which, to reiterate, he had already gotten into once before, when there weren't a group of people right there who had already shown they were willing and able to kill him. His plan fails if nobody turns into frogs to go after him, it fails if the guard takes the horn and puts it back in the shrine himself, and it fails if we kill him again when he pops out. He doesn't look like a Gurgan, but he must be to have known that this would work.

Haha, yeah, the plan was pretty weird. I even ignored the part, that he fled to a dead end (maybe he didn't know that the cave has no second exit?), but it's really weird that he doesn't just take both horns, instead of only one.

I do like that twist, with him actually not being dead, though.

Scholar is... well, it's not as bad as some of people make it out to be, but I didn't get nearly as positive an impression of it as Felix and JBear, either. Listed attack power with two books is high, but the damage isn't that impressive. It would probably be strong in the front row, but the armor available to scholars isn't really good enough for them to survive comfortably there. It would be better when hitting a weakness, but nothing in the next dungeon is weak to fire, ice or lightning except the boss. A scholar is pretty much required to beat that boss, but I'm probably not going to stick with this job for much longer after that. On the plus side, Scholar can use level 1 white and black magic, like Freelancer; in the remake, their Study command reveals an enemy's HP and weaknesses in one action; and most importantly, they use items more effectively. Arc went from Black Mage to Scholar.

Yeah, I was already surprised about the damage they did in the back row, but they missed a lot there. So putting them to the front was a really pleasant surprise. But maybe they weakened them in this version? Or, I guess to compensate for the smaller enemy groups, the enemies might just be more buff in general. It's a shame. In the Famicom version, they aren't as strong defensively as the Knight (who is just nearly invinsible if equipped correctly), but they could take five or six hits, which is more than enough, even in the front row.

Also, the guard says something like, "I'm going to dwarf-moonwalk down the stairs to the treasure room", and then he does walk downstairs backward. It's a very strange but delightful moment.

Right, I forgot about that. It's one of these charming, weird things the game does sometimes. It was a nice moment.

Hein frequently uses Barrier Shift to become weak to one element and strong against all others. Hein's speed was all over the place, going first one round and last the next, so it was unpredictable what his weakness would be at any given time. Like other bosses, he acts twice, and Barrier Shift only uses one of those actions. His physical attacks were devastating, and he occasionally cast status spells that were mostly a waste of time. He takes low damage from weapons even when they hit his weakness, so a Black Mage would've been great to have here. Terrain again did most of the work, since it could deal damage regardless of his current weakness. When I fought him, Hein shifted his weakness to fire every single time, but Arc had to Study nearly every turn to confirm that. Finally, I had him use a Bomb Fragment, which did over 1500 damage and finished him off. I'll give Scholar credit for making attack items really strong, at least; if they were buyable, the job would be quite good, kind of like a more different Ranger.

Yeah, with two turns, I expect Hein to be way more annoying. In the Famicom version, where he only gets to act ones, he basically wastes a whole round doing nothing. And it took some time for him to actually use Barrier Shift. It feels like the remake should have done a bit more balancing.

We go back to castle Argus and talk to the king there. He gives us the Wheel of Time, which is somehow used to make an airship. Apparently, he and Cid are old friends. We take the wheel back to Canaan and show it to Cid, who drops a big plot twist: he, and our party members, are not from the floating continent! He was flying his airship, full of passengers, one day ten years ago when it was engulfed by darkness and crash landed on the continent; he and four children were the only survivors, and they ended up being our party members. There's a whole flashback scene showing this. Was this bit in the original? I don't remember it at all. Anyway, Cid also remodels our ship into an airship, so we can leave the floating continent, but there is a sidequest I'm going to take care of first.

Nope, Cid never mentions to be from outside of the floating continent, and he also has no connection with the four orphans. Not a bad addition, though.

So, the remake added a Mognet feature, where a moogle in each town will give you letters from people you've met. Apparently, in the DS version, this was linked to some online feature that's inaccessible now that the DS' online servers have shut down, but on PSP it doesn't have that issue. It seems to be based on plot progression and your party leader at the time you talk to the moogle. Luneth and Arc get letters from Topapa, the elder of Ur; Refia gets them from Takka, the blacksmith in Kazus; Ingus gets them from Princess Sara; and Cid also sends letters, but I don't think they're tied to a particular character. Most of them are just generic greetings along the lines of, "hey, how are you doing, come back and visit some time", and then I do visit and they say the same thing they said an hour ago. But this time, Topapa asks for help; some other kids from Ur, whom we last saw bullying Arc near the beginning of the game, have gone missing and might be in the wind crystal cave. So we go there and find those kids being attacked by a group of bombs. One easy fight later and they give us a crystal shard they found as thanks, which gives us the Onion Knight job! That was right when I had to stop playing, so I haven't seen what Onion Knights can do in this version yet, but I'll check them out next time.

I had the DS version, but no one to ever play anything with (I didn't even know anyone else with a DS). So I couldn't do anything but ignore the quest. Always felt very annoying to me, that I would just miss out on a whole job, without anything I could do about it. Please report back, if you use it and find out if it's good.

Yeah, this was basically my experience with III - coming from the much rougher I and II, it felt like a very smooth experience. The notorious difficulty is kind of bunched up at the end, though. I won't spoil anything for you, but it'd do you well to mentally prepare for a considerable challenge before you see the credits.

Oh, as I said, I already played through the game. And even if not, I feel like the one thing that people know about this game (except for Garuda, I guess?) is that the last dungeon is horribly long and brutal. Considering that I didn't even make it through the final dungeons of FF I and II, I can't imagine having the discipline not to use savestates there. It's a bit of a shame, considering that it changes the mood and atmosphere of the whole dungeon, and makes it way less tense, but I just can't deal with the idea of having to redo a ton of stuff.

Still slowly plugging away. I climbed a mountain, met Desch and fled from Bahamut, shrunk down and visited a gnome town, met some vikings, did a whole dungeon as mini and got a boat. Listing it out like that makes it sounds like quite the adventure, but this was maybe an hour of gameplay. Early RPGs move fast, and none of them move faster than Final Fantasy (in my limited experience, anyway).

They totally move fast, at least when it comes to story. The long stuff are normally the dungeons, and they just don't take that long in this game. The only one that felt like it went on long enough to need a save point is the Tower of Owen. Which, honestly, feels like a plus in my book.

The mini stuff has been the most interesting and exciting part of the game so far. Not only is it a cool idea (shrink and explore previously unseen and inaccessible areas), but it has its own mechanical twist that highlights the importance and true aim of the job system: rejigger your party as need be for the current challenge. It's a really effective bit of game design, tucking an effective tutorial into a high-concept sequence.

But what I like most is just that it's doing something with Mini in the first place, transforming it from a simple status/spell into something that has purpose and application outside of battle. That's cool! It makes me wonder why something like never really happened in later games… there's using Float to avoid damage tiles, I guess, but that's not quite the same.

Totally. Doing more with these spells from FF II was a really fun idea.

Wow, this is not my experience at all. I'm finding FF3 really tough, and worse, really punishing. My party members fold easily, and reviving them is such a hassle— having to hoof it back to the nearest town, while my party is down a member, and where fleeing battles is a big risk— that I often just reset. It's a big factor of why I'm playing so slowly. I'm glad you're having an easy time, but man, I wish I had your luck!

As Dracula has said, maybe it's because I played FF I and II before. I mean, II wasn't hard for most of the time, but one was. Except that it feels a lot like Square had found out by now how to do difficulty in a good way, instead of just giving monsters annoying status effects.

But the beginning was more of a struggle than the rest. I got more often into new areas, where the monsters were brutal enough to kill one person, if they just had focused on that one. This gets easier as the game goes on, but never goes away completely, I guess. There is just some luck involved, in that the monsters don't gang up on one character, which actually feels to happen more often in this game than in many others. Maybe just a quirk, but as it seems to happen to you more often, I wonder if the monsters are actually programmed to be a bit more intelligent, and focus a bit more.

--------------------------------------------------------

I haven't continued, but when I'm at it, I might as well talk once more about how this game feels like such a great combination of the strength of its prequels. It takes the openness of FF I, but adds a lot of little story touches that it got from II, to give you way more of a sense of who you are in this world.

I just think back to FF I a lot of times, and always wonder how nothing actually seems to happen in this world. Sure, you kill monsters, but except for boss monsters, they reappear. And most of the times, when you do a quest, nothing happens. The state of the world doesn't change. The changes that do happen (Princess Sarah being saved, for example) are so small that they don't really feel like anything. Sure, you kill the vampire and Lich, but the city is still destroyed, no one is even rescued and basically nothing has changed. As I mentioned earlier, it feels like the world is already done, and your actions don't change anything. Sure, you know that they do, and the world will prosper again, after you are done.

But you don't see any of it. Nothing seems to change. That's why I feel like the Warriors of Light don't belong to that world. They are there, they solve problems, but the world seems kind of frozen in it's state. Maybe I already misremember, and there is a bit more actually changing, but that is what stuck.

With FF III, it feels more like things actually change. Which is impressive, because it's not THAT different. On the floating continent, not too much changes either. But it feels like people react to you more, and the companions just add a lot, I think. They create so much more movement of story, than the Warriors of Light would do on their own.

I dunno, maybe I'm imagening things, because I'm just in love with this cute game. It just feels so much more polished. Even stuff like the cute, little cannon in the pirate cave and the pianos you can play add so much, to just make the world an actual place, instead of something where you just run around and solve problems.

I really like FF III, you guys.

 

[JBear]

I really like FF III, you guys.

It's a good'un! I'm still mad that I avoided playing it for years because the internet lied to me that it was bad.

 

[gorha]

But what I like most is just that it's doing something with Mini in the first place, transforming it from a simple status/spell into something that has purpose and application outside of battle. That's cool! It makes me wonder why something like never really happened in later games… there's using Float to avoid damage tiles, I guess, but that's not quite the same.

Later games in the series tend to remix FFIII's ideas by breaking them down into parts. They have things like the dungeon in FFIV where you can't use anything made of metal, or the one in FFIX where weaker weapons do more damage, as the successors to Mini-ing yourself in the sense of requiring you to intentionally weaken your party, and Float as the successor in the sense of using magic to solve problems outside of battle. More broadly, FFIII gives you access to a bunch of jobs and then uses its dungeon and boss designs and equipment availability to push you towards particular jobs at each point in the game, while IV uses its story to make sure you're always using the party it wants you to use, and V just sort of has jobs, dungeons and bosses and leaves you to figure it out.

The bosses sound actually really hard, compared to the Famicom version. I also vaguely remember that being the case, just because of them attacking twice. Do you find the bosses especially challenging, in general? Compared to the regular enemies?

Most of them haven't been too bad, honestly. Salamander nearly wiped me out with his fire breath, and that was the closest I've come to a game over, but he was almost dead by the time he used it. Hein took a while and did a lot of damage to me, but I didn't fight him very efficiently; I should've either brought a black mage or used attack items more liberally. They are definitely stronger than normal enemies, but they don't have the chance of back attacking that those enemies do.

I had the DS version, but no one to ever play anything with (I didn't even know anyone else with a DS). So I couldn't do anything but ignore the quest. Always felt very annoying to me, that I would just miss out on a whole job, without anything I could do about it. Please report back, if you use it and find out if it's good.

I tried it briefly. Looks like they can use all equipment and spells, but have really low stats. It doesn't seem worth the tradeoff right now, but it's a neat idea, like a Freelancer but more so. Maybe they get better with higher job levels, or there are useful equipment combinations eventually that no other job can have, or just powerful equipment that's exclusive to them. It's an option to keep in mind, at least.

 

[Mogri]

Onion Knight is weak until you get to job level 90+ -- this is true in both the original and the remake, even though the remake hides the job. It also has very strong job-exclusive equipment I have no idea how to obtain.

 

[conchobhar]

But you don't see any of it. Nothing seems to change. That's why I feel like the Warriors of Light don't belong to that world. They are there, they solve problems, but the world seems kind of frozen in it's state. Maybe I already misremember, and there is a bit more actually changing, but that is what stuck.

I think you could make the argument that the apparent stasis of the world is a product of Garland's time loop— that nothing changes because it just keeps happening again— but yeah, I get what you mean. It's very much a game where all the bad stuff has already happened, and the Warriors of Light are just cleaning up the mess.

I didn't really think about it before, but I think there's a parallel to DQ1-3 here in how the storytelling evolves across the games: the first game is about the hero rolling in to an already-decimated land; the second has the party actively resist the antagonistic force while clearly being on the backfoot; and in the third, the heroes start to truly bring about change, solving and preventing problems the world over before anything can really get too bad.

Later games in the series tend to remix FFIII's ideas by breaking them down into parts. They have things like the dungeon in FFIV where you can't use anything made of metal, or the one in FFIX where weaker weapons do more damage, as the successors to Mini-ing yourself in the sense of requiring you to intentionally weaken your party, and Float as the successor in the sense of using magic to solve problems outside of battle.

This is a good point, I completely forgot about those dungeons in IV and IX. One more reason to replay, I suppose!

 

[Mightyblue]

The IIIDS onion gear is tied behind the old DS wi-fi mogmail stuff which no longer works. The mobile port (and thus the Steam version) handles it differently but I don't know how.

 

[FelixSH]

Later games in the series tend to remix FFIII's ideas by breaking them down into parts. They have things like the dungeon in FFIV where you can't use anything made of metal, or the one in FFIX where weaker weapons do more damage, as the successors to Mini-ing yourself in the sense of requiring you to intentionally weaken your party, and Float as the successor in the sense of using magic to solve problems outside of battle.

Right, and with IX, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a callback to III, considering what that game tried to do. I'm already very excited to get to that game, now that I have played all the prequels, and having just played them all then, too.

With IV, I guess it's more a bit DNA of III that stuck around. But yeah, that seems very much like an idea from a III dungeon.

To be honest, I remember these dungeons to be annoying. When I think of FF IV, one of the things I always disliked how that cave felt irritatingly hard. Maybe that's why the game always felt surprisingly hard for me. I'm really curious, how it will feel this time. I expect it to feel really smooth, like III does now.

Onion Knight is weak until you get to job level 90+ -- this is true in both the original and the remake, even though the remake hides the job. It also has very strong job-exclusive equipment I have no idea how to obtain.

Interesting. I assumed Onion Knight would just be completely useless, but I'm somehow not surprised, that it is actually a Karpador situation. I guess I will, at some undefined point in the future, try to play through the game as Onion Knights.

I think you could make the argument that the apparent stasis of the world is a product of Garland's time loop— that nothing changes because it just keeps happening again— but yeah, I get what you mean. It's very much a game where all the bad stuff has already happened, and the Warriors of Light are just cleaning up the mess.

Yeah, you just feel so detached from the world in I. I mean, it's interesting and makes the game feel somewhat weird. I mean, that's clearly a function of it being the first, a collection of D&D situations and a bit of a mess in general. But I felt detached, in a way that I don't feel in the other FFs, because you are grounded in some way.

I didn't really think about it before, but I think there's a parallel to DQ1-3 here in how the storytelling evolves across the games: the first game is about the hero rolling in to an already-decimated land; the second has the party actively resist the antagonistic force while clearly being on the backfoot; and in the third, the heroes start to truly bring about change, solving and preventing problems the world over before anything can really get too bad.

Oh, I like that read! I have for a long time felt similar about FF VI to IX. In VI, a big empire tries to take over the world, and wins. In VII, the world is taken over by a big Empire, and you fight a big war to set the world free again. In VIII, the war has been fought and everyone is tired (the world there always felt like it was recharging from something), but the old danger is trying to take over again. And in IX, the world has finally recovered, which is why the world feels so vibrant and joyful.

This is just a vague, thematic connection, and I know that it's not intentional. But it somehow has made sense to me for a long time.

Your take on the first three FFs and DQs is equally appealing.

 

[Mogri]

I didn't really think about it before, but I think there's a parallel to DQ1-3 here in how the storytelling evolves across the games: the first game is about the hero rolling in to an already-decimated land; the second has the party actively resist the antagonistic force while clearly being on the backfoot; and in the third, the heroes start to truly bring about change, solving and preventing problems the world over before anything can really get too bad.

I like this outlook, although FF3 starts with the entire world underwater, which is arguably pretty bad.

 

[conchobhar]

I like this outlook, although FF3 starts with the entire world underwater, which is arguably pretty bad.

Well, DQ3 starts with the world under threat of a demon, and the last hero who set out to stop him apparently died in the attempt, so it's not exactly rosy there either . But I think the threat, in both, is more distant and abstract than in the previous title.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Speaking personally, I’d prefer to live in a world where there’s a Demon in a Volcano Somewhere, over one that is already completely underwater.

I’m a poor swimmer for one thing

 

[FelixSH]

I’m a poor swimmer for one thing

Guys, I think Octo isn't actually an Octopus.

 

[FelixSH]

Well, Garuda wasn't so bad, after all.

Knowing what was to come, I decided to unload all my equipment at the Fat Chocobo. Mainly because I was afraid, that I wouldn't have enough inventory slots open when I would have to change to Dragoons, and I didn't want to throw away or sell my equipment.

Then I flew over Saronia, probably one of the bigger cities in the FF franchise. It is surrounded by city walls, with no visible door, which seems...problematic. When we fly over the city, we are attacked by cannonballs, and the Enterprise, our trusty airship, is destroyed.

As there are no doors in the city walls, we are trapped. The closest is the castle, where we find a yard. In that yard, we see two armies fighting each other. We learn soon, that they are actually from the same army, and the king makes them fight. Not sure if it's here already, but we learn soon too, that the king seems to be influenced by the evil Garuda. The castle itself is guarded, and can't be entered.

The city is made up of four districts, plus the castle. The bad situation seems to be due to the kings bad influence, but I can't get over the fact that the city can only be exited by airship. Considering that Saronia is the biggest city in the world, there doesn't seem to be any danger from outside. Maybe monsters? But it feels more like the people here are kept inside, rather than someone being kept out. One of the districts also has pretty high houses, and unlike most other towns, there is surprisingly little green.

In some ways, this city feels like a bit of a predecessor to FF VIIs Midgard. It seems to have been ruled well, and maybe it's just because big cities without much greenery always seems a bit dystopian to me. Of course, there are woods inside the walls, but these woods also contain monsters. I dunno, it really gives of a weird, bad vibe.

The game doesn't do much with that, so maybe it's just me.

Anyway, one of the districts contains most of the shops, which are all closed due to order from the king. Except for one, who sells lances for Dragoons, but the shop acts illegally. Another district contains the biggest library in the world, which is closed. A third district contains the Dragon Spire. We learn, that Dragoons defeated Garuda the last time, and the tower is supposed to have Dragoon treasure at the top. The final district contains more closed shops, and a pub.

There is a nice, old guy outside, and when you talk to him he tells us that this is the pub. Then he goes up to it, and tells us again "Here, this one. Someone who looks like the prince is inside." It's cute.

Inside, four soldiers are bullying the prince, who is just a little boy. We teach them a lesson in humility. All the more so, as only my Geomancer can actually really deal damage, and my Karateka a bit. But due to leaving my equipment outside, my team is very weak. We still beat them easily.

They apologies, and the prince tells us that he was exciled, when he told his father to maybe not let his soldiers fight each other. He joins us, and together we go to the castle. The guards don't want to let us in, but get message that the king change is mind. We are brought to some beds, and told to rest. But during the night, the king and his advisor, Gigameth(!), appear. The king tries to stab his son, but finally seems to throw of the mind control of his advisor.

Instead, the king can't help but stab himself. Gigameth attacks, and we fight him. Due to our lacking setup, we are easily defeated, and that's the first time in the game that I died.

So, back outside the castle (you can save in the city, outside of the districts and the castle), we enter the Dragon Spire. The Geomancer did most of the work, and soon we reach the top, which is full of Dragoon gear. It is enough to give everyone a weapon, has three armors and four helmets, I think. The armor is irrelevant anyway, Garuda attacks with a strong lightning spell and we don't want to get hit at all.

With everyone a Dragoon and equipped (I bought everyone another lance, the stronger kind from the shop), we go back to the castle.

Is this the first time, that a long cutscene ends with a boss fight? A stupid one, at that? Because I remember having to rewatch it again, and again on the DS version, because it took sooooo many tries to beat Garuda. And it's not a short cutscene either. Not a great tradition to start, even if I liked the scene, simple as it was.

I guess everyone knows about the fight? It's simple. Garudas spell targets everyone, and does over 300 damage. To reduce the amount of people getting attacked, everyone becomes a Dragoon, who now have their signature skill, Jump. You avoid the attack, everyone is a Dragoon, so the rest of the party doesn't have to fight with one less person, and the attack does more damage.

It's still a total crapshot. The damage variied between 200 and 1000 damage per attack, and it was completely arbitrary if we jump before the attack, or who. I won the fight with one character standing, and doing 1000 points of damage. A good thing, I would have probably died afterwards. So, thanks to luck, I only needed one real try. But the sprite for Garuda is quite nice:

Look at these great wings, and the...belt(?). It's a really nice and detailed sprite. FF III really goes all out with them, in some cases.

After the fight, the king dies, and the prince needs to take his place, I guess. Poor kid, he is probably only ten, looking at his size. Oh well, he probably has advisors. As thanks, we learn from a secret treasure room, which we are allowed to plunder.

We still can't get out, as we have no airship. But before we do that, we take a look at the library. There is some interesting lore, like that when the great Magus Noah died, he gave Xande, Doga and Unei all a different part of his power. Also, the tower of Owen was built by said person, and Desch, the guy who sacrificed himself, was his son. He was put into cryonic sleep, to be awakened when the tower was in danger. The tower was built, to keep the floating continent up. Well, I guess we knew most of this already, but still, nice.

We also learn that the Ancients overused the power of Light, and made the world end that way.

Saronia has quite a few magic shops with new, powerful spells. I guess we are supposed to change back to mages, which will be emphasized in the next dungeon.

We find a room with technicians, who immediately go to work to prepare the Nautilus, a new airship. This one can only land on, uh, land, not on water. And we are free again!

With the new airship, we can enter a very windy corridor, where the wind was too strong to enter with the old airship, and also on foot. We also get attacked by lame monsters, who are also jerks.

When we get to the end of the corridor, we find a mansion. And inside, we find one of my favourite parts of FF lore: Moogles! They are introduced with dangerous music, when they surround us after entering the mansion. They are cute, like weird, white cat-heads with small bodies. Somehow like that, you know how Moogles look. I love them.

But soon, Doga appears, one of Noahs students, the one who got Magic as a gift from his master. He welcomes us, and tells us that he needs help. We learn that Unei got control over the Dream World, and Xande got mortality, which made him very angry. He caused the Earthquake with the help of the Crystal of Earth.

We also learn that Goldor didn't have the real Crystal of Earth. So, everything isn't lost. We need to get to the end of a dungeon, and I already forgot the details about why.

The dungeon is another one, where we are in mini-status for the whole time. But, instead of getting mages again, I made everyone into a Geomancer. The dungeon was short, but still challenging, partly due to the Geomancers drawback, that sometimes, his attack would backfire and he would lose 1/4 of his health. I also didn't want to buy new stuff. Dunno, it just felt like too much work to change everyone again. Normally, I had a black mage for the whole game, so this was a new situation. But the Geomancers worked fine.

At the end, Doga adds the power to dive to the Nautilus, our new airship, and suddenly, we have the best airship to date.

We never get so many different airships with so many different strength for the whole series, do we? I know that IV has some vehicles, and five also adds some stuff with Chocobos, but so many iterations on airships is probably just a thing of III. It's nice!

Doga tells us, to get Noahs Lute, so we can wake up Unei. In the meantime, he will get the Eureka Key. We are also supposed to get the Invincible, a great airship.

Sorry, my notes are a bit lacking about the details here, when I learned what, and I tend to forget them soon, especially when I learned something. One thing I didn't mention is, that four claws (of which we have two now) are needed to make it through some statues that guard Xandes place, I guess. As I said, all a bit mushy in my memory.

That's mainly it. I took a detour to explore a dungeon under a triangle-shaped island, where I found a lot of treasure. As I wanted to try out the bard, I changed Picard to that job (and everyone else back to the one before Saronia, Viking, Karateka and Thief). The dungeon was a bit hard, but contained a lot of cool equipment, including new swords and the Aegis Shield.

Due to this, and because the Viking seemed a bit lacking, I changed Kirk back to a Knight. The bard was probably the most disappointing job. His attacks were weak, and his special commands didn't seem to help too much either. I sometimes saw a difference in attack power, but it varied too much. So, after the dungeon I decided to give the last job I never tried a chance: The Evoker, who can summon, but it is randomly decided if the summon has a status/healing effect, or if it is an attack. I'm looking forward to trying that out. I always had a weakness for Summoners, in FFs, and he already has a bunch of spell slots for all five levels. The first five summon spells can be bought from the little summoner village in the middle of nowhere. The other three, Odin, Leviathan and Bahamut, have to be found through side quests. Maybe I can get Odin already? I'll take a look, next time.

 

[Dracula]

Oh, as I said, I already played through the game. And even if not, I feel like the one thing that people know about this game (except for Garuda, I guess?) is that the last dungeon is horribly long and brutal. Considering that I didn't even make it through the final dungeons of FF I and II, I can't imagine having the discipline not to use savestates there. It's a bit of a shame, considering that it changes the mood and atmosphere of the whole dungeon, and makes it way less tense, but I just can't deal with the idea of having to redo a ton of stuff.

Oops, this is what I get for not reading the whole thread! Regardless, I think it's fine to use savestates in a case like this. I liked slogging through that dungeon, but when I play old games I make a point to experience them in as close to their original form as possible...but this isn't something I'd wish on anyone else. Relieving the incredible stress these older RPGs tend to place on the player is a totally valid way to play.

 

[FelixSH]

Don't worry, it's a long thread with a ton of long posts.

I do try to get a feel for what the games were originally. As a kid, I would have definitely tried the different jobs, so I do that now too. But I just really dislike repeating stuff and losing all my progress. That's why I don't feel bad about using savestates, that part of the experience is just not worth it, for me. A bit of a shame, because it would give the final bosses of the first three FFs a lot more tension, but I just can't do it. I tried with FF I, and failed. I tried again with FF II and failed again. I'm under not illusion, that I will not have the willpower to do the final dungeon of III without savestates.

If I didn't have the possibility (read: played it on the original hardware), it would probably be different, and I would just try it. But as it is, I'm too weak, and the savestates are right there.

 

[gorha]

Played some more. There's a scene when leaving the floating continent, where we push through the surrounding fog and it's draining our strength. Once the scene is over, it doesn't seem like anything came of it, though. We can go freely between the floating continent and the larger world map now. Oh, and now that we can see it from the outside, the continent does not seem to have a pillar connecting it to the surface, so the function of the Tower of Owen remains a mystery.

In this version, you can press start to see a world map, so I wasn't flying aimlessly for long. There is a small island in the northeast, and two larger ones south of it. I went to the small island first, and found a wrecked ship there. Inside is an old man watching over a young woman who seems to be in a coma. He says some stuff about darkness causing time to stop and how Aria, the woman, tried to prevent it. Talking to Aria brings up a prompt to use an item on her, and a regular old potion is enough to bring her around. She asks us to bring her to the Temple of Water. Also, she seems to be able to see the light inside the Light Warriors, and is the only person we've met who can. The largest island is home to the temple, and Aria picks up a crystal shard here, then says we should go to the cave to the north to find the rest of the crystal.

Since there were going to be new jobs once we got to the water crystal, I decided to stick with the party setup I had for one more dungeon. Ingus' Terrain usually triggered Whirlpool, an instant kill attempt to all enemies; nice when it worked on even one of them, but it usually missed. Refia was quite effective as a Ranger, but she used up all the Light Arrows I had left in this dungeon. I tried moving Arc to the front row as a Scholar, and his damage with Light books was pretty solid, but he took lots of damage as well, and died twice. Luneth as a Knight was the MVP here, since he was the only one who could really take hits, and there was a chest with a Blood Sword in the wrecked ship, which is an even stronger weapon than the Royal Sword, and also restores a bit of HP when it hits an enemy, making the Knight even tankier. Aria sometimes uses Cura or Protect on the party, but she tended to use Cura when we were already near full health, and Protect didn't seem to make a big difference, so she was occasionally helpful but not that reliable. The cave is straightforward, but the enemies hit hard, and some of them can petrify. The one detour led to a chest with Blizzaga, which will definitely prompt me to use a Black Mage again soon.

The scene at the end of the cave was weird. Aria prays for the crystal to regain its light, then says that we should merge our light with the crystal's, but then we all start walking away from it instead. Then Aria is like, "look out!" and pushes Luneth out of the way, the camera zooms in on her, and she collapses, and then Kraken shows up. I guess in the original you actually see an arrow hit her? It's weird that they would take that out. It's not clear at all what's happening in this scene in the remake. I looked up a video of it afterwards to see if it would make more sense when viewed a second time, but it really doesn't.

Anyway, Kraken acts twice and has strong physical attacks, like most bosses in this game. He uses a lot of actions casting Blind as well, and it seems more accurate than most status attacks in this game, whether they're used by allies or enemies. It was usually a wasted turn for him, though, because he would cast it even on characters who were already blinded. Terrain was good again in the crystal room, using Ice Pillar for around 1300 damage that would hit regardless of blindness, though it still used Whirlpool occasionally. Luneth and Refia struggled to do anything while blind. I had Arc tossing Eye Drops and healing, which in retrospect was probably a mistake; he should have gone on the offense with Zeus Wraths. It worked out, though, as Kraken went down eventually and nobody died.

After the battle, Aria dies in a scene that had less emotional impact for me than Desch's scene, since she wasn't with us very long. An earthquake collapses the cave, and we have a dream where an old woman in a white mage robe tells us to find Doga to defeat Xande.

We wake up three days later in the town of Amur. The flow of time has resumed and land has risen back up out of the ocean. Most people don't even realize anything was wrong. Our ship is chained up outside of town, and people say someone named Goldor is responsible. He lives in a mansion to the south, but we need Levigrass Shoes to cross the bottomless bog surrounding it. Delilah, who lives in the sewers, has the shoes, so we need to go through them and meet her. Also, there are these four old men who show up in a few scenes here claiming to be the Light Warriors; when they hear that we're going to the sewers to get the Levigrass Shoes, they decide to beat us there.

Also, the water crystal has given us new jobs. Evokers can use summon spells, but there are none available yet. Dark Knight is a physical job that uses katanas, which also aren't available yet. Dragoons can jump on one turn and come down the next to do greater damage. They use spears, and wear the same armor as the Knight, which is not as good as what we can buy for other jobs in Amur's armor shop, so they don't seem that useful yet, either. On the plus side, the spear sold here does lightning damage, which hits weakness on most enemies in the sewer. Viking is the new Knight, a physical job with high defense. They can provoke an enemy and force it to target them, but it doesn't always work and seems to only be effective for one turn when it does. Making enemies attack a Viking is certainly desirable, though; with their storebought armor, they only take 1 damage from most enemies. They use axes and hammers, and the strongest weapon in the shop here is an axe. Like the Knight was in the past couple of dungeons, this seems like a job whose equipment is too good not to use. Finally, Bards can use Sing to produce effects dependant on their equipped harp; the one sold in Amur casts Protect on the party, which Aria has already shown is not that good. There's great new equipment here for some old jobs, too, particularly Thief and Monk. There's also a new bow for the Ranger, but it's very expensive, and the arrows sold here are limited to weaker types. I made a backup save so I could experiment a bit with different jobs and equipment, and ended up making Refia a Thief, Ingus a Monk, Luneth a Viking and Arc a Black Mage.

The sewers aren't too tough compared to the last few dungeons. Arc is the only one who takes much damage from enemies here, and in the back row even he can survive. There are lots of weapons in chests here, which make Refia, Ingus and Luneth stronger still. Midway through, we find the fake light warriors being attacked by monsters and have to save them. The enemies are giant toads, one of the random encounter monsters in the sewers, rather than goblins, and there are four of them, the most yet seen in this version of the game, so this is the closest thing to a boss fight here. At the end of the dungeon, Delilah tries to trick us and tosses exploding shoes instead of the Levigrass Shoes we came for, but the fake light warriors show up again and warn us. After they convince Delilah that we're the real deal, she gives us the real shoes, and they cast Teleport to get us out of the sewers... which means they must be at least somewhat experienced adventurers in their own right, since that's a level 3 spell. They're fun, I hope they show up again.

 

[gorha]

Now that we can get to Goldor's mansion, the canoe is useful again, since Amur is completely enclosed by rivers. Actually, I guess it was a little bit useful upon arriving there, since we could go east to get back to the water temple and its free healing, instead of paying for the inn in town. Southeast of town is a chocobo forest; chocobos can also cross rivers. I think this is the first time we see that in action in this game.

Inside Goldor's Manor, the all golden yellow color scheme is pretty annoying to look at. Enemies here aren't too bad, though. I changed Arc to a White Mage because someone in town said that Goldor reflects magic. He was very effective at keeping HP topped off between fights, but didn't do much in battle, as you'd expect. Found another Monk weapon and a bunch of gold swords, which seem to only be good for selling. This is a pretty short dungeon. There are several locked rooms with nothing in them, but one of them hides the route passage to the next area. It pushes you even more to use a Thief, if you weren't using one already because of their equipment.

At the end of the dungeon, we meet and fight Goldor. He uses physical attacks and casts Silence sometimes. He also used Confuse once, and it hit Ingus, but then he died before Ingus could attack my party. He took tons of damage from Ingus and Refia throughout the fight, and couldn't do much to anyone but Arc, so it was a pretty easy boss fight overall.

Goldor destroys the earth crystal as he dies. There was someone in Amur who said he had chained up the ship to stop us from getting to the crystal, but I didn't realize it was actually in his house. Having one of the crystals destroyed is probably bad news for the world, but all we can do is keep going and hope for the best. We get the key to unlock the ship, at least.

Not being able to fly over mountains didn't feel too restrictive on the floating continent, but in the larger overworld there are lots of places we can't reach because of it. There are plenty of places we can reach, though. The island town of Duster in the center of the map sells equipment for Bard & Geomancer, some of which is also usable by mages. I bought those ones for Arc, so he should be a bit less frail now. There are bards here who sing about the summoned monsters Leviathan and Bahamut. It didn't occur to me until now, but I guess when FFIII first came out, the appearance of Bahamut early on wouldn't have been taken as a clue to the location of a strong summon to get later, since this was the first game in the series with summons.

There's a pass through some mountains far north of Amur guarded by statues. If we try to enter by land, the first two sets of statues break, but the third kills us, causing an actual game over. If we try to fly over them, the screen flashes and we just can't proceed.

Unei's shrine is in the southern part of the northwest continent. Unei is the old white mage who appeared in our dream when the land rose. She's asleep, and a parrot next to her says she's the guardian of the dream world and will never wake up. I like the music in the shrine; I'm sure it'll be appropriate for whatever scene plays when the plot eventually directs us to actually do something here.

The town of Replito is in the northern part of this continent. A Gulgan here says someone is calling the darkness, and doesn't know that unbalancing light and darkness will destroy them both. The other NPCs here are Evokers. They say that the continent of Dalg is in the southern part of the map. The Great Magus Noah used to live there. Noah sealed away Odin, Leviathan and Bahamut. His apprentice sleeps to the south; that must be Unei. It's impossible to enter Dalg due to strong winds. The only shop in Replito sells summon magic. The spells have weird names and are expensive, except for the level 1 summon, Escape, which summons Chocobo.

Ancient Ruins in the middle of the continent are accessible via canoe. The monsters here are too strong right now. They killed me in the first random encounter, and even the Thief's Flee didn't work.

A walled city covers much of northwest continent. It has a gate that won't open when approached on foot. The airship can fly over the wall, but can't land because there's no ocean there. Flying up to the castle gets us shot down, and so we're once again without an airship. There seems to be a war between soldiers in red armor on the right and soldiers in red armor but with yellow helmets and shoulderpads on the left. This is the city and castle of Saronia. The music here is kind of annoying in the remake; I've been switching between original and remixed soundtracks as the fancy strikes me, without a strong preference for one or the other, but this is one place where I strongly prefer the original.

Southeast Saronia houses the Dragon Spire, a tower full of monsters that holds the Dragoons' greatest treasure. A red soldier here says that Prince Alus was expelled from the castle. There are also chocobos here for some reason, just walking around in the upper right part of the map, ready to be caught.

In Northeast Saronia, a soldier says the king's aide, Gigameth, has a shadow that looks like Garuda, a giant bird monster. We also learn that the king divided Saronia's army into the two factions and made them fight each other. Shops here are all closed except for one that sells spears.

In Northwest Saronia is a library said to hold every book ever written, but like most things in Saronia, it's closed. Someone says that a dragoon once defeated a great avian lord, presumably Garuda.

In Southwest Saronia is a scholar's house; he can summon the fat chocobo. Also, a secret passage in his house leads to many chests with Gysahl greens. In the tavern here, a group of thugs are harassing a boy who says he's the prince. Arc is the one who leads the party in standing up to them; the scene is similar to his introduction, where Luneth chased off the kids who were bullying Arc. It's a nice callback. We fight them; they're Gold Knights, a normal enemy from Goldor's mansion. After defeating them, the prince introduces himself as Alus, son of King Gorn. He asks for our help in getting back into the castle and joins the party. The scenes when you press square with Alus in the party have him and Arc continuing to bond. There are a couple of old men in this town who give Alus gifts now that he's joined us, a Wind Spear and Dragon Mail, both only usable by Dragoons.

We climb the Dragon Spire, a short and simple dungeon. Enemies here are very easy to beat with my current party. At the top are a bunch of chests containing more Dragoon equipment. Between these and the gifts, we have enough to outfit four Dragoons, though not as dual-wielders, so I change everyone and head back to the castle.

Even with Alus, the guards turn us away, but the king gives an order to let us through and give us a room for the night. There's a scene where Arc tries to reassure Alus that his father still loves him, and also calls him "Sire" for some reason. Also, Arc looks goofy lying in bed in Dragoon garb. Then, King Gorn comes in and brandishes a knife, seemingly about to stab Alus; the party confronts him. Based on the directions they come from, Arc was sleeping next to Alus, away from the others. Gigameth shows up and urges the king to carry out the murder, but he stabs himself instead, breaking free of Gigameth's control. He says he would rather die than hurt his son. Gigameth turns into Garuda and attacks.

Garuda... is pretty frustrating. He uses a physical attack more often than not, for decent damage. On my first attempt, he eventually used Lightning for over 500 damage to whole party, wiping them all out. I remember this fight being luck-based BS in the original, and it still is. You need to be in the air when Lightning is used, but there's no way to control that. Also, sleeping in the castle before this fight does not provide the benefit of rest, so you have to visit the inn first. I did a little grinding just to get past the job adjustment period. Dragoons seem to gain job levels very quickly, so that's nice at least. Second attempt, I had everyone jump, Garuda went first, used Lightning, everyone jumped, next round, everyone came down, Lightning again, dead. Literally no player input beyond telling everyone to jump at the beginning, which is definitely what you're supposed to do in this fight, right? At this point Garuda is 3 for 3 at only using Lightning when everyone is on the ground. Third attempt, Lightning on round 2 after everyone lands. Dead again, 4 for 4. At this point, I thought he might be scripted to only use it when everyone is on the ground, and decided to try staggering jumps. Round 1, Luneth attacked while everyone else jumped. Garuda went last and hit Luneth, then used Lightning. So much for that idea. At this point I was ready to blow all my money on spears to make this easier, so I bought four Wind Spears. Although there is still a decent chance of losing when dual-wielding (the sequence from my second attempt would still have been a loss), I won on the first try after buying the spears. Ingus and Refia died, but Arc and Luneth killed Garuda when they landed from their second jumps. I guess the fight isn't too bad as long as you have the money for extra spears, although having to go through the whole string of cutscenes before each attempt is still not great.

After the fight, the king dies as he tells Alus he loves him. For me, this was the most affecting death scene in this game so far. Alus is immediately crowned the new king, and says we can take anything we want from Saronia as thanks. There doesn't seem to be any further development of the budding friendship/possible romance between him and Arc, though. Maybe he'll write? Engineers in the castle fix up the Nautilus, an old airship they found in some ancient ruins, and give it to us. They say it was built by a genius engineer, who was in flight when the world was covered in darkness. So, was it Cid? Or maybe Argus? Gorn looked just like Argus; maybe that's not just because there's only one sprite or character model for a king. There's a lot of talk here about Noah's apprentices. We knew Unei was one of them, but apparently Xande was one as well. Xande was given the gift of mortality by Noah, and it made him so angry that he turned evil, I guess? Unei received the gift of the dream world. The third apprentice is Doga, the person Unei told us to find. He is somewhere on the continent of Dalg, which we can reach with the Nautilus; the gift he received wasn't specified, or if it was, I missed it. Also, there's a bunch of treasure in the castle, including gear for most jobs that's as good or better than what was available to them before. I guess that takes the sting out of wasting money on spears just for one fight. Now that they're open again, shops here have the level 5 spells, which include Firaga and Curaga among other things, and a bunch of staves for the mage jobs.

Also, another Mognet quest becomes available around this time. Princess Sara writes that her pendant is broken, so we go and talk to her, and Ingus swears to have it repaired. I tried bringing it to Takka, and there was a scene where we asked him about it, but he couldn't fix it. But after freeing Saronia from Garuda, he sends a letter about a legendary smith who can repair anything. We find her near the library, and she fixes the pendant. She also says to bring us any orichalcum we find, and she'll make it into something for us. We return the pendant to Sara, who now reveals that it was a keepsake from her mother. At this point, there's no further reward.

 

[FelixSH]

Yeah, these four were pretty fun, as was Delilah herself. When I talked to them after the dungeon, one of them said they used an item to teleport everyone outside.

In the original, you see the Light Warriors standing back, Kraken appears at the side and shoots a visible arrow. Aria sees this, pushes us aside and gets hit. Or I think that she first pushes us aside, and then the arrow flies (unclear on the details, as always ). But yeah, all the things that were happening were clear and visible.

Dragoons, too, aren't useable at this point, as spears aren't sold. And I think the Bards effects aren't tied to the harp, sing is just an attack. I like bards a lot, just thematically, but that was the one class that felt lackluster to me. Which probably means it's the only disappointing one in the game, considering that there are only the upgrades to Black Mage, White Mage and Summoner, plus the two superjobs (Sage and Ninja, I think) left, which are all good.

Was the bard job you were refering to, JBear? Because I have tried out Evoker and Magic Knight, which are both fine jobs. The Magic Knight specifically is pretty great. I'll write more about them in the next post.

 

[FelixSH]

Not being able to fly over mountains didn't feel too restrictive on the floating continent, but in the larger overworld there are lots of places we can't reach because of it.

Yeah, the game still kept gating stuff off, by making every new way of moving around still restrictive. I do like how it worked out here, though.

It didn't occur to me until now, but I guess when FFIII first came out, the appearance of Bahamut early on wouldn't have been taken as a clue to the location of a strong summon to get later, since this was the first game in the series with summons.

True, you expect him to be a summon, because we all played FF III after the later ones, where he is always there. But here? You meat this guy in FF I, than he isn't even there in FF II. It's nice.

Garuda... is pretty frustrating. He uses a physical attack more often than not, for decent damage. On my first attempt, he eventually used Lightning for over 500 damage to whole party, wiping them all out. I remember this fight being luck-based BS in the original, and it still is.

It's the worst boss in the game, and maybe one of the worst in the whole series. Just a gamble. And it realy seems like he is even more annoying in the remake. As I said, I was very lucky in killing him the first time, when I had Dragoons.

Unei received the gift of the dream world. The third apprentice is Doga, the person Unei told us to find. He is somewhere on the continent of Dalg, which we can reach with the Nautilus; the gift he received wasn't specified, or if it was, I missed it.

His gift was supposed to be Magic. Which is kind of weird, considering Xande and Unei are also mages, but maybe Unei can be explained away by assuming she calls upon the power of the Dream World, and Xande might just use the power of the Crystals.

------------------------------------------------

Well, I beat it! As I assumed, I just used savestates. But let's back up a bit.

Big post incomming.

Last time, I just got the Nautilus, and the ability to go underwater with it. I already talked about the cave under the triangle shaped island. But there is also a village surrounded by mountains, which can be reached via a channel underwater. It's Dogas village, where a bunch of mages live, who sell white, black and summon spells on nearly all levels.

Aside from that, you can indeed reach Odin. Underwater, you can find a different entrance to Saronia. It's a short dungeon, with a sleeping Odin at the end. Funnily, there is a clue, as you can reach the level of the basement from the main castle. It's just this room with Odin, that you can't access. The fight was challenging, but doable, and soon Odin was my newest summon.

I'll go into detail about the jobs in my next summary post. But for now, let me just say that Evoker is a very fun class, even if it's a bit frustrating sometimes.

After that, the sidequests are done, and I continued to the Temple of Time. You need a Thief or Magic Keys (Sisko was still a Thief, so no problem there). There are a lot of closed doors, that you need to open. It's also the first place for Behemoths to appear, but they aren't that big of a deal. The whole dungeon wasn't too interesting, and we finally reach the end, where Noahs Lute waits. We take it, and go back to Unei.

I think I mentioned, that I visited her already? She is deep asleep, but you can talk to her parrot. With the Lute, we can wake her up. She is rather quirky, running on the cavern walls, before telling us to get the Invincible, the final airship, from the Ancient Ruins. She also joins us, and gives us the Fire Fang, number three of four.

I already had visited the Ancient Ruins, but there were stones of Adamantium, which blocked the way. Unei easily destroyed them with a time stone, or something. Inside, there are scholars who learn about the cave, I guess. They also have set up a shop.

What you are supposed to do is buy some Ancient Swords, because the monsters in here split when attacked. Thankfully, they only seem to split with the rest of the HP after the attack, and summons don't have the problem, so it works out. It's not too bad of a dungeon, and soon, we have the Invincible.

It's unfortunately slower than the Nautilus, but elsewise, it's pretty great. It's also very big and nicely detailed. It's the first airship that you can actually visit as a place, and run around on top. It has a bed for you to sleep, some shops with new equipment and spells, and a place for the Fat Chocobo to appear. It's basically our new homebase.

The main thing for movement is, that the Invincible can get a bit higher into the air for a short time. This makes it possible to sort-of jump over short mountain ranges. Which makes it finally possible to reach Falgabard, the city of the Magic Knights.

Inside, we can finally get equpment for that job. Considering that the next dungeon has even worth splitting monsters, I changed everyone but my Evoker to a Magic Knight.

Someone had clearly the idea for Cecil already, when they created this class. People here talk about overcoming the Darkness. We will go way more in depth in FF IV with this.

There is a cave in Falgabard, which is only there for you to find stuff. Another hidden cave, behind the waterfall, hides an old Shinobi, who fights us. When we win, he gives us a great blade for the Magic Knight. Armor is hidden in the town, too. I bought equiptment for the others, and went away.

Magic Knights are pretty strong, and they get a few charges of White Magic. Really nice class.

Hidden away behind mountains is the Cave of Shadows, one of the longer dungeons in the game, with the annoying splitting monsters. There are also other Magic Knights here. One of them is dying, and gives us his great Kotetsu. But this dungeon is annoying, even aside from the monsters. Many hallways are hidden. You can see the entrance, but have to look around to find your way. I didn't like that gimmick, and wished it was in a shorter, easier dungeon.

But in the end, we find the Earth Fang, the last of the four. Hecatncheir attacks us, and dies pretty easily. Next, we need to meet up with Doga and Unei in Dogas mansion.

The Invincible isn't a straight upgrade from the Nautilus. As mentioned, it's slower, but it also can't get underwater and it can't make it through the windy path to Dogas place. Therefore, we have to switch a few times between the airships.

But first, there are two more sidequests, namely Leviathan and Bahamut. I will also talk about the summons more in my final post. For both, you need to get to a dungeon on the floating continent, which is locked away by a short mountain range. With the Invincible, that's no problem. The dungeons are pretty easy, and the monsters die fast. I changed Kirk back to the Knight and Janewe back to the Karateka, but left Sisko as Magic Knight, because he was pretty strong. Leviathan and Bahamut have to be defeated, but both are relatively easy bosses. They hit hard, but go down fast enough.

Back on the main world, we get back to Dogas mansion, and are immediately teleported by Doga to his grotto. Another dungeon without much interesting going on, except for a room full of skulls (or probably skeletons). I have no idea what the significance of it is, as there isn't much in this grotto.

At the end, we meet up with Doga and Unei. They have two magic keys for us, but first, we have to fight them. The Eureka key needs their power, which it can only get by their death. So, we fight, first Doga

and then Unei

They are actually old humans. I have no idea why they transformed into monsters. Doga was somewhat challenging, but Unei was just another easy boss.

They actually die, but give us the Eureka and the Syrcus tree, which we'll need shortly. Our herous actually really liked the two old mages, as they didn't want to fight them. But Doga and Unei didn't give them a choice.

So, it's finally time to get to the horribly long endgame dungeon.

There is one place, where we couldn't get to. Four pairs of statues are standing in a mountain corridor, and throw our airship back, if we try to fly through. They still do that. If you pass them on foot, you die, except if you have the corresponding horn. With the horn, the statues get destroyed. And we finally reach the Ancient Maze, which is a giant wall, guarding the Syrcus Tower, where Xande is summoning the Cloud of Darkness (CoD, from now on).

First, we have to make our way throught the Ancient Maze. At the start, we find a room which contains the Earth Crystal, which Xande had all along. When we get near it, Titan attacks us, who is weirldy enough named exactly as the summon. His sprite is pretty nice, though:

Again, not a tough fight. Sorry, the bosses are all just damage races. There isn't much tactics or skill involved. But they often look nice.

With that, we have our final, regular jobs, the Summoner, Devout and Magus. I never used Magus, because I just waited for the Sage. But I did, of course, upgrade Picard from Evoker to Summoner. I tried to do the dungeons with that party, but Hi Potions just aren't enough, and this game has no X Potions. You just need a Devout at this point, so I made Janewe, my Karateka into one. Which was fine, she started to lag behind with her damage output a bit.

The first time through, I just got all the treasures, made it to the end, and went back to recharge. You can save between the Ancient Maze and the Syrcus Tower, but you can't sleep or buy no stuff.

These two ways made me strong enough, so that this part became already easy enough. Then I entered the Tower, and it was horrible.

What you are supposed to do is go to Eureka and get the treasures from there. You need them, the addtional levels and the two final jobs (or at least I needed them). Elsewise, this Tower is pretty hard, and a huge difficulty spike.

But I didn't realize that, and just walked up, to the top first. After some horrible floors, I reached a room with five wyvern statues and a mirror. When approaching the mirror, my party got paralyzed, and would have been killed by the Wyverns. But Dogas spirit helped me, and he got aid from all around the world.

Princess Sarah from the cave with the Djinn, Desch, who actually never died (come on, we are already doing this?), Prince Alus, whose father died against Garuda, Cid and one of the four old guys, who thought they were the Heroes of Light. Which implies that, yes, these old guys do know their stuff, as each of these five fights against one of the Wyverns. Which leaves us to enter the mirror and face Xande. And get horribly killed, because Meteor is a brutal spell, which one-shot most of my party at full health.

So, change of plans. I found out that I should first visit Eureka. Inside, the monsters were way more managable, and there were a few super-weapons (mainly swords) in there, hidden behind boss fights. Nothing too brutal, they all went down relatively easily. One of them even unlocked the final price: The ultimate jobs, Sage and Ninja. Behind them, there are three sages who sell equpiment for the ninja, and the final spells.

I changed Kirk and Sisko to Ninjas, which made it possible to give both two of the legendary weapons. Picard and Janewe became Sages, with Picard as mainly a summoner and Janewe as the mainly White Sage.

These classes are clearly stronger, and with them, I climbed the tower again, with less trouble this time. Even Meteor wasn't too bad anymore.

So, Xande dies, and is another antagonist who didn't appear for most of the game, only to die pretty much immediately. But it was too late, and the CoD had already arrived. Let me show you the great sprites of both bosses:

Again, it's really clear that Square knew at this point, how to get everything out of the system. They look both really great and detailed. Both look even better in bigger sizes. Please note the heart above the eyes of the CoD.

Anyway, the CoD is invincible, and we just die. Everything would be lost, except that our friends are brought in by Doga, who uses his last power to revive us.

Yes, we actually died. It was pretty bad.

But fully healed, we finaly go to the last part of the dungeon, the Dark World. I guess this is a place, where actually people would live, similar to the World of Light we inhabit. But with the Darkness becoming too strong, it became this optimized, weird monstrosity of a place. I like to think that the Darkness, while helping this place when in balance, just consumed it all, and the Dark World became just a slave to the Cloud. So, we likely are freeing this place as well as the World of Light.

Aside from that, we learn that with a too big imbalance of either Light or Darkness, the Void, which was once the only thing in the Universe, would take over everything again. It can only be stopped by an equilibrium of Light and Darkness.

The World of Darkness is actually not that big of a place, and the monsters aren't too bad. I actually never died, since starting the climb of the tower in earnest, and wouldn't have needed savestates. Oh, well, I nearly would have.

The game should really inform you, that you have to free the four Warriors of Darkness, before you fight the CoD. Honestly, together with how mean this place is and how long it takes, this is just bad design. Make the CoD just not accessible, before the four Heroes of Darkness are free.

But I knew about that, of course. There are four big rooms to traverse, for each of the Crystals. They are basically dark equivalents of our Crystals, one for each element. On the way to each Crystal, there is also a chest each time, containing ribbon. But you first have to fight a Xande Clone, which knows meteor. Pretty risky, and considering that FF III doesn't use status ailments nearly us much and as mean as the first two games, they aren't as necessary. I only fought one Xande clone, so I had a second ribbon for my second Sage. The first one I got from Eureka. The ninjas didn't actually get Ribbons, because the Crystal Helmets were stronger defense-wise.

The four Crystals are guarded by four monsters, which are very uneven. The first two were barely a thing. But Arimahn, the third, had a ton of HP and nearly wiped me. The fouth, uncreatively called "Two-headed Dragon" hit so hard, that most characters just died with one hit. Not too much of a problem, as he only attacked one person at a time, but still. These two were among the hardest bosses in the game.

With all four Heroes of Darkness freed, we finally attack the CoD. And it's a pretty epic and lengthy fight. I used up my ten Shurikens, and then just tried not to die while still dealing damage. Again, not too interesting, but intense. Still, the CoD finally died.

And with that, it's over. This post is already way too long, so I'll make the rest short. Before the credits, we see how everyone who helped is brought back to their home. Desch doesn't go back to the tower of Owen, but to Cids town, where the woman who helped him still waited for him. Sarah came with us, as she and Kirk were into each other.

And finally, we see how the world shines in a new light.

Well, that was that. As always, I will write a final post somewhere during the next few days, and then take a break.

 

[Zef]

I've never really understood the cosmology of FFIII. This is the first time that the series deals with The Void as the ultimate, world-ending force that the greater FF cosmogony studies, and it's pretty clear what its role is. But if the World of Darkness can have Dark Warriors who seek balance and fight evil and protect life just as well as the Light Warriors do in the World of Light, then what is the difference between them?

Later FFs muddle the issue even further, especially that one dude hoisting the light and the dark, but I'm interested in what III has to say about them. And if the World of Light can be flooded and frozen by Darkness, or burned and extinguished by excessive Light, presumably the same thing can happen to the World of Darkness, right?

(Heck, AFAIK, if both the WoD and the WoL were flooded by Darkness by the time the Ur-kids showed up, then maybe the WoD has been reduced to just a castle floating in the void because the Void HAS consumed everything else already, and was on the brink of finishing the job and getting started with the WoL.)

 

[YangusKhan]

I've never really understood the cosmology of FFIII. This is the first time that the series deals with The Void as the ultimate, world-ending force that the greater FF cosmogony studies, and it's pretty clear what its role is. But if the World of Darkness can have Dark Warriors who seek balance and fight evil and protect life just as well as the Light Warriors do in the World of Light, then what is the difference between them?

Later FFs muddle the issue even further, especially that one dude hoisting the light and the dark, but I'm interested in what III has to say about them. And if the World of Light can be flooded and frozen by Darkness, or burned and extinguished by excessive Light, presumably the same thing can happen to the World of Darkness, right?

(Heck, AFAIK, if both the WoD and the WoL were flooded by Darkness by the time the Ur-kids showed up, then maybe the WoD has been reduced to just a castle floating in the void because the Void HAS consumed everything else already, and was on the brink of finishing the job and getting started with the WoL.)

It's taking an immense amount of self-restraint for me not to dive into a lore-heavy FFXIV wall of text, but I will just say that FFXIV takes these concepts and does some amazing things with them.

 

[Mightyblue]

In III you can talk to the old Warriors of Darkness in the Dark World, who fought off a Flood of Light, yeah.

XIV is probably the one game in the series that goes into that divide in any depth, but that's also spread across several expansion packs worth of story. Generally speaking though, Light and Darkness aren't the same thing as 'good' and 'evil'; in order for life to flourish you need all of the elements to be in relative balance and both light and dark tend to just be more elements in the games where's that important.

 

[FelixSH]

I think the WoD and the WoL are just mirrors of each other. Basically, the WoL is guarded by Light, and draws it's power from it. In the WoD, it's the other way around. So, it's a world consumed by darkness, but as lively and vibrant as ours. There probably is no actual difference between the two, aside from that. And all that follows from that, of course, if your power source is different, than your technology and magic might be too. But I assume that both are worlds, where you can live a regular live.

As I assumed in the big post, I assume the Darkness just got so strong, that it completely consumed the WoD. It wasn't it's power source anymore, the CoD used the WoD as a last basis, that it needs to survive. But all else is gone, because the CoD doesn't want to spend energy in keeping the WoD and it's inhabitants alive.

That's what comes to mind, anyway. It is surprisingly rich, and offers a surprising amount of food for thought. I mean, that's probably just because of vague informations. But it's interesting thinking about it.

Consider, the Heroes of Darkness, who saved the world, weren't celebrated. They were imprisoned and guarded.

In III you can talk to the old Warriors of Darkness in the Dark World, who fought off a Flood of Light, yeah.

XIV is probably the one game in the series that goes into that divide in any depth, but that's also spread across several expansion packs worth of story. Generally speaking though, Light and Darkness aren't the same thing as 'good' and 'evil'; in order for life to flourish you need all of the elements to be in relative balance and both light and dark tend to just be more elements in the games where's that important.

FF III treats it similarly, I think. It's still early, and the storytelling isn't that expansive (especially in this game). We get the idea, that the darkness is taking over everything, so we assume Darkness = Bad. But at the very end, we learn that this isn't the case. There is a World of Darkness, where, as I said, people could potentially live regular lives, and we need a balance between the two. There is a permanent struggle, and from the other side, Light seems probably like the evil one. But in the end, the two forces must work together to avoid being obliterated by the Void.

It's taking an immense amount of self-restraint for me not to dive into a lore-heavy FFXIV wall of text, but I will just say that FFXIV takes these concepts and does some amazing things with them.

Feel free to go into detail, if you want to. I'd love to read about this, because the concept of Light taking everything over fascinates me. And I guess use a spoiler, there are probably some people who don't actually want to read about it. I would like to, though. Only if you feel like it, of course.

 

[conchobhar]

Felix, gorha, I should say that even though I'm not directly interacting with your posts, I'm still following along with them. It's just that because I'm not as far as either of you, I've only been reading up to where I am in my playthrough, and coming back for the rest after I've caught up— so by the time I actually read a post in full, you've posted another, and the conversation has moved on. But I'm enjoying hearing your take on the game, Felix, and how it compares to my own; and gorha, it's very interesting to hear how the remake differs from the original.

Anyway, my own playthrough has been going well— in true TT fashion, as soon as I complained about difficulty, I stopped having it. Since my last post (when I got the boat), I've said goodbye to Desch (RIP), helped some dwarves, talked to a crystal and got my second set of jobs, got an airship, left the continent to sail a vast ocean, found a temple, talked to another crystal and got my third set of jobs, and woke back up to a new world map… like I said, it's been going well.

Something that really impresses me about this game is how well it signals when to change jobs. It's already been mentioned how the game will toss job-specific weapons and armour at the player as a hint, and sometimes NPCs will tell you what to do. But the jobs themselves play a role, too, as they always seem to drop off in effectiveness right around the time you get a new series of jobs— a further reason to try something new. It's made the ever-shifting party composition feel very natural, because I'm not just responding to the free stuff, but following my own intuitions about the strength and effectiveness of my current line-up and adjusting it as I see fit. It's all very well done, with a lot more thought put into it than I would expect from the era (perhaps unfairly).

PS: There's a neat detail with the boat outside Amur. You can still enter the boat, and try to sail away— but after a couple squares, a chain becomes visible and prevents you from leaving. It's a nice touch for such a short segment; it would have been easy and acceptable to just prevent the player from even entering the boat, but they went the extra step of actually tethering it to shore.

 

[FelixSH]

That IS a nice detail, I just assumed the NPC told the truth (that the ship is chained). I love these little details, it's part of why I love this game - it's so playful. They added all these little details.

Please don't forget to play the piano, I think there is one in Amur.

I think FF III, more than any other game in the series, is relatively hard at the beginning and end, but pretty easy during the mid-game. You just get really powerful for a long time.

I'll write a bit about the different jobs, and the job system in my final post about the game. It's true, the game guides you pretty effectively to the jobs it wants you to take. But I think you have more freedom in your choice than people generally think. You c, and probably should, upgrade, but not all jobs need to, it feels. Might be wrong there, but especially the second and third sets of jobs seem to by viable until the endgame, aside from specific places that demand certain jobs. But maybe I'm wrong, I'd be really interested how the different jobs hold up throughout the game.

And thanks for telling me that you enjoy my posts. I'm never quite sure if anyone will read my giant posts. Which is probably silly, considering that I always get responses.

And yes, thanks gorha, I also find it interesting how the versions are different. Thanks for adding that perspective.

Anyone up for doing the DS/PSP/Steam version of FF IV, while I play through the SNES version in one or two weeks?