Interman's Final Fantasy extravaganza

March 21, 2008


So.. Travelled through the desert to the arena.


And kicked some ass.


But instead of getting Hilda the boss of the place transformed into a bunch of sergeants and whatnot, who tossed me in jail.


Good thing I have ninja friends.

So then we left that place, went back to the rebel hq, and found out that the nearby castle had been invaded by nasty monsters. I cleared out that place,


and fought the leader, who wasn't really that powerful.


With him out of the way the rebels had a nice new hq, but since they probably wanted me to have something to do "Gordon" informed me that I should try and get this magical spell called Ultima. To do so I needed two masks...


Good thing they had it in the basement. The monsters probably won't miss it.

Continued...


The black mask was definitely not in the basement, but the guardian was pretty weak. I had him for lunch.


Next I needed a scepter to go with the two masks. It was deep inside a boring place with mobs that could turn my entire party to stone in one round, so I had to do it a few times to get it right

With those items acquired I set sail for the crescent shaped bay, but it suddenly got windy and the boat was swallowed by the great leviathan. My guest disappeared though, which was a bummer.


The leviathan had swallowed quite a few other scepter carriers it seemed. One of those was a knight named Richard, who joined my gang. Apparently the people were unable to escape because of some big worm.


Not the prettiest worm, but with it out of the way it was smooth sailing from then on. According to the walkthrough I need about twice the HP I currently have to make it through the final area, so I guess tomorrow will suck.

March 23, 2008

Thanks to the change spell, which gives a character the hp/mp of an enemy I've grinded my way to a decent amount of health and mana. The earliest monsters have like 6 hp and 0 mp, which means I gain quite a bit with each successful cast of change.

This meant I could get through the nasty tower without being instagibbed.


When I got there the festivities began immediately.


Inside I fought a bunch of mages, who specialized in some elemental force.


They had helpers too.


Chasing down the ice mage.


With all the mages gone I ran into my buddy Minh, who helped blow up the door to the room that stored the Ultima spell.


He died in the effort, but I didn't have time for a burial ceremony, so I kind of just left.

Continued...


With Ultima in my posession I went back to the rebels, but in the meantime it seemed something had gone wrong. The evil emperor had summoned a huge whirlwind, which had pretty much annihilated most of the cities, except the castle. I went there, and they said the only way to get inside the whirlwind would be to fly there. Remember the whole dragon thing from before (of course you do)?




Here we go. With the dragon's help we got inside the dragon, kicked some butt, and made it to the emperor.


He didn't seem impressed by our presence.


But then I beat up his guards.


.....Yeah


With the emperor gone all was well, and we all started dancing

BUT THEN


I was wondering when BOB would show up.



Stay tuned tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to Final Fantasy 2

March 24, 2008

BOB had hidden away in this big castle, close to the arena where I saved Hilda earlier. The only problem was that it's in the middle of a mountain, so I'll need something that flies.





I found Cid at Paul's (the ninja) place. Looks like I've got the airship problem sorted.



And here we are.



After a bunch of fighting I made it to BOB, who wants to rule the world I guess. About a minute later the emperor I "killed" returned, made a huge mess, and to make matters short BOB joined my gang and Richard got killed trying to save us.

As we escaped the emperor turned the castle into some even scarier hellish version. The snag now is that there's no easy way in.


The hard way involves going via this ancient road that demons take on the way to hell.


Yay.


In Pandemonium you can get the very best items in the game, but they're pretty much all guarded by bosses,


of different shapes and sizes.


Finally, this is it.


This big fella hits hard and has a whole lot of HP. The thing is though, he really dislikes "blood swords", and I have both, so the fight isn't hard at all.


Hopefully the last time.


Thoughts about the game: (it's 3am, sorry for the rambling)
FF1 and 2 are pretty similar. The sequel has been dialogue and characters, but it lacks a few of the "wow that's neat" moments of the first one. Still, the graphics and audio have received a nice upgrade.

Like the first one this is a pretty long game. In fact it's a lot longer than it needed to be. I followed the recommendations in a walkthrough in terms of how much HP/MP I needed to get past certain areas. In retrospect I could've gotten by with less, which would've meant less time spent grinding. I'm glad I haven't kept track of time spent grinding, because it's a pretty intimidating number of hours (I'd guesstimate about 50 hours of total play time). If you play the game as you would play a modern non grindy RPG you'd get pretty far, but in certain dungeons the monsters just hit a lot harder than you can handle.

Advanced players might be using more of the spells that are available, but for the most part you can get by with physical attacks and healing spells. The whole "level up something by using it"-system works ok, but no more than that. It's fairly easy to exploit, and it means that in order to use high end spells you have to spend a lot of time leveling up EACH spell. So what if the spell just doesn't do that much damage at the maxed out level? Well that's tough, I guess. You will in other words risk gambling away hours of time spent leveling, and I don't hate myself enough to do that.

Oblivion does it right though, but it's interesting to see one of, if not the earliest implementation of this system.

Overall it's a pretty nice game. I'd rank it a tiny bit behind FF1.

started 3 yet?

You'll gonna have a blast now

Originally Posted by hiv

started 3 yet?

No I'm taking a well deserved break

FINAL FANTASY 3

It's been six days now, so I guess it's time for more grinding, more NES graphics, more beep beep music, and more grinding





In short, new stuff needs killin'



And so it begins.



After making your way through the pit you enter the icy part, where you're attacked by something weird.



Which is basically this guy. If you've been paying attention to the previous pages you'll see one small difference already. Damage is displayed as a brief animation, instead of showing up where 1x hit is now. It looks nice.



After kicking some turtle butt you start talking to the crystal.



Hey haven't I done this before?



Sweet I've made it into the 90s!


Initial impressions are good. The characters look a bit different, environments look nice and saturated, the music isn't too bad, and the UI seems improved. There's apparently a "jobs" system, which I guess I'll learn more about soon enough.

April 13, 2008

It's been a while since the last update, and that's a combination of I'm being too lazy to crop and upload the screenshots, and other stuff happening. I've made it to chapter 4 out of 7 now, and here are some of the highlights.




Poor Cid, always getting into trouble. The village had been cursed by some nasty guy who had turned people into ghosts, but I fixed that whole thing.


Messed around with a huge dragon for a bit, but we had to run...


Dropped by a town of really tiny dudes.


Got my official mission.


Helped some dwarves get their magical horn back


TWICE


And cleared out this bad guy who had invaded some magical tree.


So far it's been fairly standard FF-fare. The third iteration has some pretty cool improvements in terms of jobs, pacing, itemization, secret areas, and more. I'll write more about that in a later post.