TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (Square, SNES, 1992): Issue #006: Sioux Falls Basin

It's not often I get to use the name of my home town as a reference in one of these things.

But now people kind of know where I'm from, as if I'd really kept it that much of a secret.

Anyway, before we get to go into the Ice Pyramid, we've gotta go through a little mini-dungeon called Falls Basin. There are a couple new enemies in here. One's the Lamia, which had already appeared in at least Final Fantasy IV by this point, and the other's the boss monster, the Snow Crab. The Snow Crab will be the basis for a weaker version in the Ice Pyramid in much the same way earlier boss monsters have come back as weaker forms, and will happen for the rest of the game as well. The Lamia is the first monster that actively uses status attacks on a regular basis, if I recall correctly.

The bigger challenge here is the switch puzzle of sorts, where the party has to move blocks of ice around to use as platforms to jump between ledges to get through. It's not a terribly difficult puzzle to figure out, especially if you've played the game before, but it still takes some trial and error to get through.

Considering that this is an ice themed area, there are not as many enemies that are expressly weak to fire around here as one might think. There are some, of course, but they only seem to count for half, at best, and one might expect more than that. The Snow Crab, for example, was weaker against Phoebe's Thunder spell than it was against the fire spell the game gave us in Focus Tower.

Speaking of magic, Ben's Heal spell is in Falls Basin. There are still a few status effects that it'll be useful for, but even now, it's a little limited. The battlefield between Falls Basin and the Pyramid has another new enemy to demonstrate that. The Mage, as it's called, tries to use a silence attack on the party, but the magic ring we won in a previous battlefield already blocks silence attacks. For clearing out this battlefield, we get an extra 540 XP. Would have come in handy if I'd have leveled up on the last fight in the field instead of the second to the last battle. This is because there's another little glitch in the game where leveling up in the last fight in one of the battlefields that gives XP as a reward makes the game give Ben two levels instead of just one.

But this is where I'm going to call it for the night, because, per usual, I'm up later than I really should be as I write this. So, until next time, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!