Interman's Final Fantasy extravaganza

April 26, 2008

I'm back. I've actually gotten a lot done lately, but taking screens, cropping them, uploading them and making these posts take time so I've just played instead. Story wise it's been kind of same-ish / boring, so that hasn't really helped either. Anyway, here are some highlights.


Beating up another dude for his crystal. Unfortunately he breaks it just as he's dying, but it doesn't really matter.


Stumbled across a prince in trouble. He joined my team and we headed for this old woman who could help us further.


Her buddies weren't expecting us, but for once I didn't have to kill them or anything. She had me try and get to a friend of hers who happened to be in a coma, or something.


I've dealt with comatosed people before, so no problem.


Unne eventually had us look for this huge airship that was being kept by some nasty monsters.


It was worth it. The ship "invincible" has stores that sell high-end items, a fat chocobo which acts like an item bank, a bed where you can restore HP/MP, it can jump over small mountains, and if it runs into any random encounters it opens by firing cannon balls


This is after having fought through a whole bunch of fairly boring dungeons for really fat loot and some story progression. The tower you see there is basically the final place to visit, but it's pretty huge and comes with teleporters to several alternate worlds...


This is what it looks like inside, at least the first few minutes.


But before going to the final final final area I had to visit a place where the weapons that are too powerful for humans are kept. They're guarded by bosses, but they're dispatched relatively easily. Like in the previous games they're the Masmune and Excalibur sword, but also some new throwable weapons, a badass staff, and more.

Continued...


At this point I've gone through the final final final area and have headed into the even more final area where you can't even get out. In fact, at this point you have about 438359 bosses to kill. FUN.


Throughout the game this guy has been the main villain. "Hell yeah I'm finally gonna kick this guy's ass".


But wait, Zande was just a puppet, being played by some even nastier evil entity? First time for everything!!


After having my butt kicked some of my friends showed up and helped me out. Now I'm off to an EVEN MORE final area.


Groovy. Here I have to beat four mini bosses, one in each direction. You see, in this bizarro world there are four dark heroes that I have to rescue. They will in turn help me out when I'm going for the final boss.


DO NOT WANT.






Thanks buddies.


So this is what the thing looks like before it starts frying me with AOE spells.


And this is what it looks like as it's blowing up


Thoughts about the game:
Final Fantasy 3 is yet another good iteration in the series. It's the first that comes with a proper job system. I didn't count, but there's probably about twenty jobs - some that are like prestiege classes (fighter to knight), some are variations of other (knight and mystic knight), and ultimately two jobs that can do just about everything (ninja and sage). Throughout the game you'll change jobs relatively often, and that was fine by me since I was going by the walkthrough, but if not I'm certain there would've been many times when I would go "it sure would've been useful if my characters were conjurers instead of geomancers", or something like that. Jobs also come with unique items. One city may be a geomancer city if you will, which is where you'll find most of the normal items for a character in that job. The problem comes when you have to carry multiple sets of items so that your character(s) can change job in the middle of a dungeon where you don't have access to your item bank (the fat chocobo). All in all it's a nice enough system as it does provide a fair amount of diversity to the gameplay.

FF3 has a bunch of espers for you to call during battle. Most of these just do AOE damage, but some heal you. At first they're kind of useless, but during the second half they start to really shine as you can use more of them without resting or downing an elixir (restores MP).

Some of you may remember how annoyed I've been at your characters hitting 'nothing' when a different character had already downed the target. Square fixed this, so now in many cases you can just hold down rapid A and sit back as the dudes fight. Still, if such a situation comes up the character will randomly choose a target, so it can be smart to put some thought into what target to go for, but it matters a whole lot less this time.

In terms of graphics I'd say the third looks yet another notch above the previous two, as expected. Overall they've polished the graphics by adding some nice effects and fairly detailed landscapes, but the fight screens and so on look about as good as they did previously. I didn't really listen to the audio for more than about ten minutes, so I can't talk too much about that. Now that I'm FINALLY done with the NES games I'll probably listen more to the upcoming games.


And finally I've decided to start linking what I used to help me get by, in case someone else is dumb enough to do what I did and want to finish it in less than a lifetime.

Walkthrough: GameFAQs: Final Fantasy III (NES) FAQ/Walkthrough by Yoichi
Info regarding weapons, armor and spells: Welcme to the Final Fantasy III Shrine
Map 1: http://www.rpgclassics.com/shrines/n...overworld1.gif
Map 2: http://www.rpgclassics.com/shrines/n...overworld2.gif
Map 3: http://www.rpgclassics.com/shrines/n...overworld3.gif

Armed with that you should be OK.

FINAL FANTASY 4

Once again I needed a long break from the FF series, but after finishing up some other parts of my backlog it was time to try Final Fantasy 4. I loaded it up, and after the first three or so hours (it keeps track of time now) I'm pleasantly surprised.

Here are some of the highlights


Aaah, SNES.








You basically play as a character who was in charge of raiding villages for crystals, but you can't make yourself do it anymore, so you leave the service of the king. Soon enough you find out that some evil guy is getting the king to do his bidding, and it's up to you, your buddy, and the people you meet, to stop them.


Cid's back!


The first boss fight. This time bosses change shape, and behave in more interesting ways than in the previous games. In this pic one of the characters is doing a jump attack (dragon warrior), and as you can see the attack menu is still open for the other guy. You see, combat is closer to real-time now, so attacks take place while you're using the menu, and if you for some reason leave the game with the menu open you might get back and find your group dead. If you're fast this can be used to your advantage though.





Awesome.


A hovercraft lets you reach new areas. It works like the chocobos, so you don't get attacked while using it.


Rosa is a girl who had a serious fever. After beating up a bunch of antlions we got the cure, and got her back to consciousness. She joins the party as a much needed white mage.


With Rosa along we moved to a nearby mountain, where we ran into a monk


who has a nifty flying kick ability.


Graphics are great so far and the music doesn't make me want to kill myself. Gameplay is smooth and overall less annoying than before. At times the random encounters are really close to each other, but I'm managing. Thumbs up so far.

lol, making a thread that noone cares about a sticky. way to go interbabe

says the king of quality posts

Do you have a ps3 for ff13, with all the experience you're getting you should be able to finish it easily!

I'll have one by the time ff13 is out. We'll see if I'm done with the others by then though

May 18, 2008

I've been having some problems with the screenshot app where it's sometimes not really saving the screenshot at all. Most of the good ones are here though.


Cain gone bad.


Guess we're going down, again.








Making my way to a shrine where I can change from dark knight to holy knight (paladin). Dudes are getting in my way of course.


Once there I have to fight a copy of myself, but the big lesson is that you have to defend a few times instead of just spam attacks.





Guess I'll need that diet food now. Pigs make terrible fighters.











Riding a black (flying) chocobo that's able to land in forest areas (normal airships can't). In the cave I'm looking for the earth crystal, and save Rosa.





Getting close.

Tella, the wizard gets pissed off and wants to revenge the death of his daughter. Starts off by spamming the major elemental spells, but it's not doing too much damage.


And finally does the ultimate sacrifice, using Meteo, the uber mega spell of ultimate destruction. Shame it doesn't kill him, just injures him or something. He takes off with the earth crystal, but we rescue Rosa and find that Cain isn't being mind-controlled anymore (so Meteo was good for something)


Yeah buddy

well sad to say i only played its crisis core edition.
well i guess i may also join you in trying the other versions lol