Monday, July 16, 2012

TEXT PLAY SIDE GAME: Final Fantasy (NES 1990/PS 2003 [Origins]): Issue #7: “I VANT TO SUCK!”


“YOUR BLUD!!!”

I am going after a vampire, after all. And since there's no clinic in Melmond for me to revive dead party members at, I was going to get the Life spell, in addition to more healing items, but I didn't have the money. Probably going to need it, the way my luck's been going. But at least I got the items.

I was also considering upgrading my weapons and armor, but at this point, I'll be finding the same or better things in the treasure chests I'll find along the way, and I'll be getting a ton more money along the way.

The townsfolk in Melmond say that the reason the Earth is going to shit is because there's this vampire that's taken up residence in Terra Cave and is draining the place dry. Because we're a band of heroes, we're going to go do the right thing and go in there to kick his ass and make that element all better. The trip to the cave itself isn't particularly difficult, but getting through the cave, on the other hand, is something else all together. There's a hallway on the first floor, for example, that's become the stuff of legend. It's called the Hall of Giants, and every step you take brings a fight with giant class monsters. These things can kick a guy's ass fast, but it's good for level grinding. And things will only get worse all the way down.

Actually getting down to the vampire is doable, of course. Hard, but doable. The random battles are against monsters that can beat the crap out of your party members. Granted, it's not as bad as it is in Final Fantasy 2, which CLG's Apple talks quite a bit about in his LP of the game. But I had to abuse this version of the game's soft save “memo file” feature to get there, and it still took most of my supplies of healing items and magic to get there. This is one of the things that got me to give up on the game when I owned the original 8-bit version of it. As I said here, at the time, I thought it was too hard.

But after fighting my way through three floors of not only undead and poisonous monsters, but ones that could turn party members to stone, I finally did get to the vampire. I had kind of thought that this would be a longer fight. It sure seemed like it had been all the previous times I did it. I guess actually saving my Dia2 and Fire2 spells for my mages and having my Fighter equip the Rune blade really worked wonders, because for as hard as the random battles getting to and from the boss fight were, the boss himself wasn't particularly hard. Took him out in one round.

Once the vampire is dead, we find we can't go much farther, as there's a big stone slab blocking the stairs to the next lower level. For now, all we can do is take the Star Ruby that the vampire was guarding and go back to Melmond, where everybody speculates that maybe the vampire wasn't the one making the earth rot after all, as we killed him and things aren't getting better. They also speak of a guy called Sarda who can help us with this and a titan who likes to eat jewels. But that's for the next couple issues.

Before I wrap this up entirely, though, I'd like to mention my all-monk runthrough of the game. I seem to have reached the first of many sticking points in that idea, as I seem to be unable to get past Astos. I think I may just need to level grind a bit to get through that, because the way things are now, well, this loop pretty much sums up how it's working out.

But next issue of this Text Play will be Fifty-Three Steps To Success, Part One. With any luck, there'll be a little more Legend of Mana before then.

Either way, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

No comments:

Post a Comment