---
Tower of Walse
-The guards are defeated. Garula apparently went berserk and attacked.
-The king and an unknown knight went in.
-We see the king on a higher floor. Down, but alive.
-Interesting! A vine mechanic lets me climb walls to higher floors. Feeling a bit “Ocarina of Time”-ish.
Interesting mobs here, including Pas de Seul (huh?) which looks like Deathgaze from FFIV:TAY.
-Found a silver armlet: “Shiny and effective!”
-The knight to be named later thinks Garula is being controlled. By whom?
-OW. GARULA HURTS. Makes sense for an angry mammoth, but still… OW.
-THE CRYSTAL THEN SHATTERS! Why? Amplification technology = bad or corrupt, or something else?
-The knight, still unnamed: “Lord Galuf!” Who is he???? And by he, I mean both Galuf and the knight. He says he couldn’t protect the fire crystal. Is Galuf the king of the city that owns the fire crystal?
-The crystal fragments are glowing and NEW JOBS.
TIME MAGE
MYSTIC KNIGHT
SUMMONER
RED MAGE
BERSERKER
Some random dude cosplaying an FFV time mage.
And BERSERKER!!!!
Warning: "Clerks" clip,thus NSFW:
My love for this job is like a truck.
Did the game designers come up with the coolest possible job names and ideas and find a way to make them work? Probably. And I imagine this is only half of the game’s jobs.
-My joy at these jobs is interrupted by the tower itself sinking. Wait, not just the tower, but also the entire peninsula on which the tower resides. It falls into the sea.
-We’re drowning, but Syldra saves the day!
-…by eating us?
-Yes. She’s protecting us by putting us into her mouth, swimming to shore, and coughing us up. Doing so expended her strength, and she dies.
-Her death howl will haunt me.
---
Castle Walse
-Rumor is that there’s a wounded soldier from Karnak in the barracks, who came from the meteorite. Something about a warp?
-Already, with the crystal shattered, the water’s getting dirtier. I’d hate to see things two years from now if nothing changes.
-Hm. The soldier warped here from Karnak somehow.
-A king’s aide suggests returning to Tycoon. Worth a visit.
-Off to Karnak to try to save the fire crystal.
---
On Grinding
A large part of the post-water crystal playtime wasn’t on story stuff though. It was grinding.
Grinding often has a negative bent to it. Some argue that the word is by definition negative, that if you’re doing something over and over but find it enjoyable, then it’s something other than grinding. I use the word more neutrally.
I grew up on Everquest. That was my first game of choice, the first MMO I really came to love. I played it back around release for about five years until World of Warcraft released. It wasn’t perfect at all – what game is? – but the main method of leveling in the game was grinding. You’d find a “camp,” a particular area where monsters would spawn, and kill them as they spawn. Over and over and over.
That actually makes it sound faster than it was. As a solo player of most classes, you’d kill a monster or two, then sit down for 5-10 minutes to regain mana and health, and then do it again when the monster respawns. Groups were faster, and some classes were faster, but as a Wizard or Magician I took a little while.
When World of Warcraft came out, it was a joy. You could actually quest, not grind! STORY! FUN! It was a great change, as grinding really wasn’t all that great. At best you’d achieve a kind of zoned-in mental focus that would allow you to deal with especially long grinding sessions. Friends helped the time pass.
My fear on starting this FF playthrough is that the earlier games would be grind-heavy, that I’d have to just go around killing monsters to level up. That fear was unrealized. (Well… mostly. Hi, FFII. ) And yet in this section I found myself grinding again. Just wandering around the continent of Walse and killing monster. Not because I had to or because I couldn’t otherwise beat the content, but because it was SO DAMN MUCH FUN!
I don’t necessarily mean the combat itself. It was most just attacking ab unch. But playing around with the mental side of it? Oh yes. Just leveling up the basics of different jobs for my characters and experimenting with how certain combos should work together. So much of this session was doing this almost randomly, haphazardly. Like, “OMG I WANT TO BE A FISTS OF FURY TIME WIZARD,” so I got time mage with the Barehanded ability. Or, “MY LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A BLACK-MAGIC WIELDING TRUCK BERSERKER.” So many possibilities!!
This will change, but some more immediate things I think I’ll try working towards:
Faris: Berserker main, with possibly Retaliation from Monk as a backup.
Bartz: Hm. Monk with something else?
Galuf: Some kind of caster damagey thing. Black, summoner, blue.
Lenna: White and time magic.
This is just a start. I think I only have like half the available jobs, so I’ll adapt as I get new ones.
---
Walse Meteorite
-Went in and found a portal that sent me to the Karnak Meteorite, a couple of continents to the east.
-Since the tower,
That most frumious of creatures.
-Wasn’t Galuf hovering over one of these portals in the intro? Hm.
---
Next time:
Karnak!
