Here's one I've been meaning to get to
for awhile now, and since tonight's not a good night for Legend of
Mana, now's as good a time as any, I suppose.
Now, chances are, if you've been gaming
for very long at all, or if you've ever known somebody who's a gamer,
you've proably heard of something called “Final Fantasy”. The
reason that title is so well known is that the Final Fantasy series
has been one of the staples of the gaming industry for a quarter
century now. I'm sure you see that I put 1990 in the title. That
was the US release on the NES. The original Japanese version was
released on the Famicom in 1987, a good three years in advance of the
US version.
Part of the reason for that may have
been that the game's developer, Squaresoft, was pretty much in the
crapper back then and only had the budget to do one last game. With
that in mind, they decided to have a little fun with it and made what
turned out to be one of the most popular console RPGs of its time, if
not ever. More importantly, Final Fantasy popularized role playing
games on consoles, and in doing so, changed the fortunes of
Squaresoft.
A quarter century on, Squaresoft, now
Square-Enix, is something of a major player in the console-based RPG
business. This is in no small part to the fourteen, I believe, games
in the main series, some of which have direct sequels. And perhaps
better yet, this turn of events led to there being other RPG titles
and series that I may yet get to writing about in this seires.
Addressing why I'm doing this one
specifically while I've still got the Legend of Mana Text Play going,
I should explain why I've been meaning to get to this for awhile.
See, some time ago, I'd mentioned on the County
Line Gaming forums having a bit of trouble with the Final Fantasy
Origins disc I bought at a second-hand gaming store back in 2010, and
I've finally gotten around to trying to fix that, I've decided to see
if I'd actually succeeded. And since I'm going to play through
anyway, I may as well do a Text Play.
By now, I'm sure we all know the story
of this game. Four heroes turn up in the kingdom of Corneria, or as
it's called in the Origins version, which is the one I'm playing,
Cornelia, each bearing a crystal. These crystals each correspond to
a certain elemental force, meaning fire, water, earth and air. Once
the four enter the village, palace guards block the exits to escort
the party to the king in the castle. But first, it really pays to
stock up on things as best one can on 400 gold pieces.
My party this time around is a fighter,
a black belt, a white mage, and a black mage. The first three, I
named after similar characters in the fourth Final Fantasy game:
Cecil, Yang, and Rosa. Since there's no straight black mage in that
game, at least not for terribly long, and I've always considered
myself more that sort of character anyway, I named the black mage
Jesse.
So, anyway, after stocking up on basic
equipment, it's time to go see the king of Corneria, who basically
explains who you are and what the basic premise of the game. And
then he assigns us the intro quest to go rescue Princess Sara from
the Temple of Chaos to the northeast of the castle.
So far, I've just been level grinding
around Corneria, because that's kinda what I remember the Nintendo
Power strategy guide suggesting when this game first came out way
back in the day. I'll kind of be working from my vague memory of
what was in that, though I haven't actually seen a copy of that in
years. Fortunately, I've already been through this game a few times
and pretty much know where to go and what order to go there. But one
thing I'll be doing in order to refresh my memory on this is using
ApplegodZMG's
second
playthrough on CLG.
But anyway, I'll be getting back to the
Legend of Mana Text Play soon. As I said there, I'll be using a new
artifact then. And in the next issue of Final Fantasy, it'll be up
north to the Temple of Fiends, in this game's Nature
Trail To Hell.
No comments:
Post a Comment