Wednesday, June 6, 2012

TEXT PLAY SIDE GAME: Final Fantasy (NES 1990/PS 2003 [Origins]): Issue #2: Beating Garland


So, not anything like a similarly-titled Dire Straits song, but the title still works.

As the title suggests, this time around, I finally get on with beating Garland's ass. I think I mentioned before that Garland was a knight from Corneria who went rouge and kidnapped the princess. The king gives us the fairly simple mission of going to a place called the Temple of Chaos to get the princess back and kill Garland in the process.

I say fairly simple because at this point in the game, the monsters can still do a number on the party. That will change quickly since I'm playing on the Easy Mode that Origins came with, but for now, getting through this is still a little tricky.

Another thing that keeps this from being a matter of simply going into the temple and kicking the crap out of Garland is that there are treasure rooms that need to be looted as well. One has a leather cap that I gave to my fighter, the other has a tent and a potion to restore some HP. All of these things will come in handy here in some way. It would be smart to use the tent to refill the party's health, at least; one can never have too many potions; and I've already said what I did with the helmet.

Along the way, I got my party up to level four, which made doing Garland in a little easier. It still took three rounds to do it, however. With Garland gone, the princess takes the party back to Corneria, where the king declares that the party is indeed that of the Light Warriors and has the bridge to the mainland rebuilt so that we can cross and begin the game proper. But that's for next time, because I'd like to do more justice to one of the most iconic pieces of video game music ever.

I should note at this point that I'm doing a second playthrough of this game concurrent with this one, only with four monks instead of the essentially default party I'm using now. Since, to the best of my knowledge, the story is essentially the same no matter the party makeup, I won't be writing about the other playthrough unless I've got something worthy of mention. The reason I'm doing this is because, in the course of doing the initial research for Issue #1, I read something that suggested that a party of four ninjas can pretty much beat Chaos in two rounds or less. Since monks class change into ninjas in the course of the game, I figured I'd give it a shot, so I could say I've got half a chance of actually beating this game even if I didn't get the issue I had with the disk fixed. We'll find out about that in due time, of course.

Anyway, until next time, folks, stay safe, have fun, and keep gaming!

No comments:

Post a Comment