I've just gotta talk about Final Fantasy for a moment

[Chronicler]

I don't remember if this guy had something to say like "If you find any extravegantly rare minerals be sure to bring them to me and I'll cook up something for you", but if you bring him the adamantite he forges excalibur for you. I think that might've been the most powerful weapon in the original NES version before they added all the bonus dungeons and stuff in the GBA remake.

I don't have anybody who can use it though so I guess this was a waste of time.

 

[Chronicler]

There's my baby. Tiamat was tougher than I remembered. He did poison damage, ice damage, and lightning damage, in addition to physical attacks, so it was tricky to set up the appropriate spell protections while still healing and buffing my attacker.

 

[Chronicler]

I just realized, literally all three of my casters know some variation of the spell "Temper".

This means once all the defensive spells are taken care of, I can just have all three of them buff my rogue to greater lengths every turn while my rogue just focuses on murdering. Nothing before the bonus dungeons would really ever warrant that level of focussed killing power but still pretty cool

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

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Since Urdnot Wrex expressed an interest in familiar faces, we did get this Cid Namedrop. I don't honestly know if it was in the original NES version or if it was added in the remake. It definitely reads like they're trying to reference somebody we already know about. Like an MCU After Credits scene or something.

Sounds indeed like an Easter Egg, but the only bell it rings for me is El Cid, the Spanish hero from medieval times, which probably has nothing to do with it. But I don't know the Final Fantasy games at all, so I wouldn't recognize a reference if you hit me over the head with it. I only recognized D&D creatures.

Also, I'd be curious to know what Tiamat looked like there!

 

[Chronicler]

Sounds indeed like an Easter Egg, but the only bell it rings for me is El Cid, the Spanish hero from medieval times, which probably has nothing to do with it. But I don't know the Final Fantasy games at all, so I wouldn't recognize a reference if you hit me over the head with it. I only recognized D&D creatures.

Also, I'd be curious to know what Tiamat looked like there!

Ah, Cid's just always the dude who makes the airships. One of the recurring faces in the otherwise unrelated stories that make up the Final Fantasy games.

I didn't grab a screen grab of Tiama but here's a pic I grabbed off the internet. She's like a six-headed dragon, and looking it up I didn't realize she was a girl.

 

[Chronicler]

Forgot they threw a trogdor reference in one of the bonus dungeons! Game was released in 2004 so that might've been topical back then.

 

[Chronicler]

𝅘𝅥𝅮I've been waiting my whole life for just one, Fuck!𝅘𝅥𝅮
𝅘𝅥𝅮All I needed was just one Fuck!𝅘𝅥𝅮
𝅘𝅥𝅮How can you say that you don't give a Fuck!𝅘𝅥𝅮
𝅘𝅥𝅮I find myself Vivified coming back again!𝅘𝅥𝅮

 

[Chronicler]

Interesting thing I just learned about the bonus dungeons.

Part of their gimmick is that once you enter them, you can't leave until you come out the other side.

So I've always been religious about having a separate save for when I'm in the dungeon, so I don't get stuck in an inescapable situation.

Apparently if you die in the dungeon it just boots you out, as opposed to anywhere else in the game where you die and you get the game over screen and have to go back to your most recent save, so it's not as unforgiving as I thought.

 

[Chronicler]

Honestly I feel like this party's really come into itself in the endgame. All four of them are pretty serviceable with weapons when they need to be. The lack of high level black magics isn't hurting as much as I thought when it comes to crowds. Some cool strategies are opened up by the redundancies, like having the ranger cast vanish and the enchanter cast protera on the same turn, buffing the entire party's defense/evasion making us physically sturdy very quickly.

The major drawbacks I'm noticing are first that nobody has enough mana. Without any pure casters we burn through that stuff way too quickly.

And the ninja's magic defense is like abysmal to the point where I'm not really sure how to adquately compensate for it. Any kind of spell will pretty much just knock him on his ass, and most attack spells are group targetted, so it's kind of hard to avoid them.

 

[Chronicler]

Currently investigating whether better armour would allow my ninja to survive a spell on occasion. I'm not actually sure if armour helps with that.

Near as I can tell gloves/gauntlets are just a no go for the ninja. I think his unarmored bonus might be hands specific. Needs those hands all nice and nimble for his ninja shit.

 

[Chronicler]

So, in the past it's been frustrating pairing my rogue with a paladin.

Because the paladin just has such great gear options in the endgame. In addition to being able to use a bunch of the bonus dungeon weapons, it has a paladin exclusive set of gear spread between those bosses, that have the best defence rating in the game, a minor stat boost, and each of them resists a couple elements and statuses, so when you complete the set you're basically resistant to everything outclassing even the rogues natural resistances.

Found this set of Dragon Armour this time though. Don't think it was even off a boss. Think it just dropped randomly off some mook. And I was noticing my rogue was taking even less damage from magic than usual. Turns out the dragon armour resists fire, ice, and lightning, which isn't everything, but it's certainly the three main kinds of magic damage. So you can combine the rogues natural resistances with gear resistance. Gonna have to keep that in mind next time.

Ninja apparently has a genji armor set, which is like a budget version of the paladin set, and it looks like it'll help the guy survive a spell from time to time.

 

[Chronicler]

So what I'm finding with the third bonus dungeon's bosses is that Cassidy is the only one that can really keep up with them at all. It's gonna take some effort to wrangle the team into shape if I wanna do all the bonus dungeons and I'm not sure if I'm up for that. I'm pretty sick and miserable right now. If it doesn't sound more fun later I'll probably just skip right to the final boss dungeon instead.

 

[Chronicler]

Okay, let's get into it. Before we move onto the final dungeon, I'm gonna recap some of the points I kind of glossed over leading up to this.

So the very first quest we were given in the game was to save the princess from Garland. Garland was the kingdom of Corneria's greatest knight, their golden child, but then one day suddenly without warning he turned against the very kingdom he served, kidnapped the princess and started making outlandish demands. Nobody's strong enough to stop him, but if you could, you'd prove to the king that you really are the Light Warriors prophesied to save the world, and he'd aid you in your quest.

"I, Garland, will knock you all down" is kind of his trademark phrase. I think it was originally from wonky NES translations, but it was so popular with the fans that they've kept it in subsequent localizations. Despite giving his kingdom so much trouble he's a bit of a pushover. Guess he was a big fish in a small pond.

The Lufenians sent five of their greatest warriors out to stop this calamity long before we came along, but they never returned. Rumor has it they were turned into bats.

From our view in the Sky Castle, we can see that the energy of the elements hasn't merely been fading. It's being siphoned. It's going somewhere. To the chaos shrine specifically, where we fought Garland all those many moons ago.

We return to the chaos shrine, and the bats now talk. They are indeed the Lufenian warrios sent to save the world 400 years before us.

The energy being collected by the chaos shrine is being sent somewhere. Or somewhen I should say. With our now awakened crystals we can follow the energy 2000 years back into the past, to when the elements first began to fade. What could it mean though?

 

[Chronicler]

So, you refight each of the four elemental fiends as you go through this dungeon, and I'm not actually sure if I've ever done this in Jeph Ludwig's version before. I usually just keep plucking away at those bonus dungeons until I get bored.

There's some interesting drops here. Got a cool blade for my ninja, and a better dagger for my rogue.

 

[Chronicler]

And there it is, the final reveal. When we killed Garland in that temple of chaos, it was a strange ritual, allowing him to basically ascend to godhood with the power of the elements he'll have retroactively stolen. We are the reason the elements are faltering in the first place.

It's a completely stable timeloop. We kill him 2000 years in the future. Then he kills us 2000 years in the past. He must succeed in this battle, or else nothing in the game would have ever happened in the first place. His victory is completely assured.

Or is it? We were the warriors destined to save the day, but dare we hold onto hope, now that this very same destiny has spelled our demise?

 

[Chronicler]

There we are, it's over. In the original NES release, The Final Boss was kind of comically easy. The Monk could actually kill it in one hit. They tweaked the numbers for the GBA remake to make it a more climactic finish, and then Jeff Ludwig tweaked them again in his mod. I only finished with one party member surviving with 20 hitpoints left. But ultimately I'm glad they left the worst of the challenges for the optional bosses in the bonus dungeons.

 

[Chronicler]

The final end scroll was hard to screen capture, but I thought it was pretty cool. You can watch it here.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

This thread was an interesting view into the early history of a game series I have never played... thanks for sharing!

 

[Chronicler]

This thread was an interesting view into the early history of a game series I have never played... thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Yeah, I was pretty happy to just talk your ear off on the subject.



A lot of the humour in this video is pretty juvenile (get back in the kitchen, domestic abuse jokes, etc), but I'm pretty fond of this song retelling the story too.

A particularly fun touch imo is that in this telling, the light warriors open with a variation of the same line fighting Garland at the beginning and the end of the game. ("Your defence is weak, fartin's tougher than you. Good knight turned bad knight? Good night to you." and then again at the end "Your defence is weak, fought imps tougher than you. Good knight turned bad knight? Good night to you.")

This to me implies that even with all the ways their journey had changed both of them, even with all the power Garland had achieved, the Light Warriors saw right through that, to some fundamental strength of character, and knew that this was ultimately the same weasel they'd fought all the way back in Corneria. No matter how he adorns himself with the trappings of godhood his small petty human heart will ultimately be his undoing. And even if you stripped the light warriors of all their weapons and spells, they'd still have a kind of power Garland will never understand, right where Garland has his rotten core.

 

[Antimatter]

Off-topic a bit, but yesterday when I watched the Guerilla Collective showcase I noticed a new game called Beloved Rapture. It's an RPG inspired by Final Fantasy 6. There are a lot of secrets, NPCs to meet, job boards with quests, minigames, and other things to find.



Check out the Steam page for the game, developed by Rapturous Studio: