FFIII - Part 3: Ending/Don't Stop Me Now

I went through this game faster than I intended, as before. This was SO AWESOME. FFI was good, and FFII was neat too with some cool parts, but this was the first Final Fantasy that felt like a truly complete and wonderful game. It had challenge, customization, good story, pretty good characters, variety, humor. I’ll try to quick hit a few areas:

Graphics: I learned from last week’s discussion that the art style is a Japanese thing. “Kawaii.” I also heard the term “Chibi” bandied about elsewhere, but not sure if that’s just related, or has more negative connotations, or what. I don’t entirely like it. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not just playing a Rugrats game where a bunch of two-year olds are pretending to be in a fantasy realm.

But the sprites (that’s the term, right?) aside, the in-battle graphics were phenomenal, beautiful. Creative too! So many of the monsters were not just well-drawn, but unique. My personal favorite was the Catoblepas, the bull with wings. The final game boss was AMAZING, that woman sticking out of a swirling black hole with magic snake tentacles.

Where do those names come from btw? Some are clearly Japanese words, and some are from myths/stories/pop culture – LOL at the ninja monsters called “Shinobi”- but Catoblepas? Malboro?

The backgrounds and dungeons were really cool too. The Dark World was my favorite. Speaking of…

Story: It started pretty standard. The crystals are going out. Re-light the crystals and save the world from darkness and blah blah blah. That’s more negative than I really mean; if it had been that simple, the game would’ve been fine! Each game has had a twist of some kind so far, and this is my favorite.

They didn’t make light good and dark bad. They made them two sides of the same coin. I do wish they spelled out more what this meant, what “light” and “dark” actually entail, but there’s a dark world! And we got to visit it! Some trippy shit, too. All starry and spacey and purple gas.

But is the dark world just that, just random monsters, or are there civilizations and societies there too? I have to imagine that the dark warriors who saved me had their own adventure like us, where they were plucked out of their normal life after being chosen to fight the evil forces of light. I would totally play an FFIII addendum, similar to Souls of Rebirth, that followed a part of the dark warriors’ adventure to restore the dark crystals.

Characters: FFII was a step beyond FFI by having main characters with personalities and stories. FFIII went beyond that by having them be better personalities and stories. Luneth, the main character, was oddly the least developed. Ingus was also a bit on the typical side, a loyal soldier in love with Princess Sara (the same one from FFI?).

My favorite two were Refia and Arc. Refia is in-your-face, takes no shit, and is at the same time upbeat and fun. She also didn’t get stuck with a romance, which for some reason makes me glad. Arc is shy and unsure, bookish. The best part of his story is his friendship with the young Salonian king. They just wanted to be friends! FRIENDSHIP!!!!

The side characters here were once again pretty good. I guess Cid being in or mentioned in every game is going to be a thing, which I’m fine with. He’s awesome. Who the fuck was the teddy bear with the pom-pom on his head? What was the deal with the mail system? I’ve seen him before in Final Fantasy imagery, like promotional material for later games, so maybe they’ll explain more later.

Challenge: Definitely the hardest game. FFII: Souls of Rebirth was tough too, but in a grindy way. I suppose I could have grinded to make it easier, but without grinding, the game presented a tough but not insurmountable challenge. The toughest bosses were Salamander, Gutsco’s second form, and the final boss, Dark Cloud. I died often, but usually there was some strategy adaptation that eventually made it work.

There were some weird spikes in difficulty. The Temple of Time was really frigging hard, way harder than most of what came after it, with its behemoths and the monsters that cast Lightning. Died a lot there. And the Eureka cave within the Crystal Palace was much easier than anything around it, even the bosses.

Those aside, it was a very smooth ramp in difficulty, and often adjusting my characters’ jobs was enough to get around. Bringing us to…

Mechanics: This is the highlight of the game. The customization that started in FFI with class selection and increased with individual skill building in FFII goes into overdrive here with the jobs. It gives the game a real sense of replayability. This is the first in the series that I wanted to give another shot immediately after finishing. Maybe try a bard, or evoker, or monk more fully, or…

This builds on the difficulty issue, but the game managed to encourage me trying new jobs without requiring that I stick to a “main” set or max one set out. It gave me room to play around and experiment. My main build that I stuck with through most of the ending content was:

Ingus: Dark Knight > Ninja
Luneth: Dragoon
Refia: Geomancer
Arc: White Mage > Devout

But I spent a lot of time trying out Viking, Red Mage, Thief, Monk, and Knight too. This is the combo that just seemed to work best for me. I would’ve tried Black mage on Refia, but the Terrain attacks on Geomancer were so powerful and satisfying. And Refia just DESTROYED Eureka! It was like every other attack was Shadowflare, that hit consistently for 9,999.

Completed the game around character level 52-53.

A few other mechanic notes:
-IIRC, they finally add rest and save points in dungeons in FFIV. It was a pain in the butt here, as it was in the prior games, to be unable to recover health and mana midway through long dungeons. That said…
-I really love that after you kill a boss, any kind of boss, your knocked-out characters get revived and your health and mana get replenished. It made the final dungeon tolerable with regular boss fights.
-The magic exchange system was a bit awkward for job swaps.
-I liked the optional stuff! I found some of the summoned bosses, Odin and Leviathan. Eventually found Bahamut too. Bahamut was pretty easy with my dragoon, and Odin wasn’t bad, but Leviathan was brutal. I feel like I missed a bunch of exploration, which adds to the replay value. I looked underwater for places that might look like they have caves, and likely only saw a fraction.

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Next up: FFIV! Going to play the PSP version, no PPSSPP emulator. I grew up on this game, so it’s the one and only in the series that’ll be a replay for me. Spent hours watching my brother play it on SNES growing up, and played it myself too.

I hear the DS version is great, but DS doesn’t look great emulated. The double screen set-up means that at its largest it takes up only half the screen and has poor resolution. 

FFIII - Part 2: Salamander? I Hardly Know Her!

This session was the most difficult of my entire run in Final Fantasy so far.

After the Tower of Owen, I headed up to the Dwarf Island, where some dude named Gutsco was being a pain in the ass. He stole their sacred ice horns (...) and after I killed him and got them back, he turned to have been only mostly dead, stole them back, and took the power of the Fire Crystal.

That's when the shit hit the fan.

I got to the bottom of his magma cave and found him with the crystal. He turned into a pretty goofy-looking dragon, or "Salamander," and proceed to kick my ass six ways from Sunday. Died 3-4 times the same way. My party (warrior, thief, red mage, white mage) was doing okay, and then he fire breathed me down, killing everyone shortly after.

Eventually, I stopped trying to heal efficiently on my white mage and just tried to stay up by group healing with the level 1 cure every round and Cura when necessary. Blew all my cooldowns, including Antarctic Wind and Zeus' Wrath, but eventually made it through with both mages dead and my warrior and thief on low health. But a win's a win!

The Fire Crystal got me a new set of jobs. WOOHOO!!!! Especially if the next two crystals each grant even more jobs, this game will have easily the most replay value of any of the first three. The problem is that they only give the briefest and most summary descriptions for what the jobs do and what their strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities are.

For the moment, I'm trying this:

Knight
Monk
Geomancer
Scholar

Some questions:

-What does Knight's "Defend" do? Is he anything more than a more defensive alternative to the Warrior?
-Why are the Geomancer's weapons ("Luminous Bells") so weird? I love her terrain attacks so far. The variety is pretty cool, as long as she doesn't get those always-fail instant death abilities during boss fights.
-Does the Scholar suck as much as he seems to at first? Because he seems to suck big time right now, beyond situations where I need to see enemy weaknesses.

The big question:

Is a white mage always necessary basically? The others feel interchangeable to some degree, but I worry that it's a mistake to not keep the White Mage the whole time. In a non-plot-spoilery way, I'd love to hear your experiences with parties that leave out the White Mage.

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Next up: Going to go help that town that got looted and pillaged by Argus.

EDIT: Another question: do you guys recommend picking a party and sticking to it, or building up a variety of class options for each character?

FFIII - Part 1 (addendum)

The DS art style takes some getting used to. The characters models in game all look like their 10 years old, even characters clearly old and middle aged. I haven't really seen a lot of anime, just a few episodes, but it seems in the style of some of those.

Actually... what it most reminds me of is a series of dolls I've seen around. My brother collects them:

It's not bad, and it's a cool change from FF1-2 GBA Dawn of Souls style, but still getting used to it.

FFIII - Part 1: HELLO AWESOME GAME

Well, waaaay longer session than I intended. Unhealthily long. One goal for this week is to keep sessions to 1-3 hours. Wrapped up after killing Medusa at Tower of Owen.

The job system is really interesting here. I guess jobs are classes, and you don't lock in each character's job at the beginning. Rather, you can flip between them somewhat smoothly. Each character has a base level that raises, and then each job they play levels up while they play it. So my character whose red mage job is level 13 could swap to thief, but she'd have to level it up from 1.

The game has a lot of jobs to pick from, mostly classics. Warrior, thief, black/white/red mages, monk (the bare-hand fighter, can't remember if the name is different), and... probably one or two I'm forgetting. My current set-up is Warrior, Thief, Red Mage, White Mage. My red mage is absolutely the all-star of the team, and I like the safety of the white mage too. Thief's damage is great, and steal is useful. Warrior is the only one I'm seriously thinking about swapping out of. He's tanky enough, but I don't know if he adds a whole lot compared to other choices.

My big concern about the last game is totally gone. The main characters here are awesome. My favorite is Refia - good mix of sass, fun, and badass - but the whole cast has got some personality.

Hi, Refia!

Fights seem smaller in general, capping out at three mobs per fight. I like this. They seem tougher, and the bosses can get two shots in per round, but I really was not a fan of the massive fights full of little guys from previous games. The best example is the Pravoka pirate fight from FFI. Not tough, but artificially long.

The plot is both retro (even for its time) and really, really interesting. Four elemental crystals to save, just like from FFI, but with a twist about a Dark World that keeps getting brought up. "Fine," I thought, "a dark world like in FFII full of evil monsters and baddies and whatever."

Not quite.

A town full of Ancestors of the Ancients told me that Dark and Light here are much more balanced, and the last time shit went out of whack, it was because the LIGHT side went overboard. There were Dark Warriors then that arose to fight the Light and restore the balance. This time, our party is Light Warriors, but not because the Light is inherently better than the Dark.

This is very cool to me. It's still pretty abstract, and I'm not sure what Light/Dark really mean, but I like the premise.

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Oh! One more thing. It's not just a bunch of normal human towns. In the short time I've played, I've met gnomes, Vikings (!!!!), and a race of blind clairvoyants. Wonderfully built world!

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Next time: onto the Dwarf Island, where fire lives apparently?