Mine?
Yep, we're going to the Mine this time,
to get Reuben's dad out. There's two more battlefields along the
way, so I figured I'd get those taken care of at the same time. The
first is occupied by the same as what was in the last one before the
town of Fireburg and gave 1200 gold as a reward. The second had
Flazzards and Red Caps, pallet swaps of the Salamanders and Brownies
we've seen before. It gave the Thunder spell as its reward. This is
our first Wizard level spell, and one I thought we got back when we
got the Gemini crest.
But before we can get on with that, we
need to deal with the dude who lives in the house in the pit. We
actually have to go try the door before Tristam will give us the
Multi-Key to open it with. Once we do break in, the guy says he
pussed out because there were too many monsters in the Volcano for
him, and he just kept running when he say Reuben's dad get trapped at
the Mine. He also gives us the Mega Grenade, the top-level bomb
weapon in the game, to use to get Reuben's dad, named Arion, out.
About the only real difference between the Mega Grenade and the
previous version is that this one is ranged when used on the level
map screens. It's not a completely useless gimmick, but I think we
only get to use it maybe twice to advance the plot from here.
There's also a house in the southwest
part of town where a lady will sell us the Battle Axe for 500 gold.
It's a decent upgrade to the ax weapon, but we can't always one-shot
things with it any more, either. That's one thing about this game.
We're somewhere near halfway through, and only now are things getting
to be what most of the main series games I've played are like at the
very beginning. I'll get more into that when I wrap this run up, but
I will say now that one thing I may have neglected to mention before
is that this game runs on a game engine very similar to the one found
in one of the other series localized with the Final Fantasy title for
the Game Boy. I think it was the one that went on to become the
Romancing SaGa series, but I'm not entirely sure. I'll get more into
the details later, but for now, I'll say that the monster sprites
change as they take damage, and I do believe that this is the only
one of the Final Fantasy titles for console systems where that
happens. I could be wrong, though. I just mention it now, because
this is the first time we've really got a good and proper look at
that since the very first battle at the start of the game.
Getting back to the game itself, the
Mine has a couple new monsters as well: mummies and Red Skulls. The
mummies are fairly self explanatory, the Red Skulls are just pallet
swaps of the skeletons from the Bone Dungeon. I think they may have
gone a little far with having virtually all the monsters in this
section of the game being weak to water. It's to the point that
these usually undead monsters are effectively strong against fire,
even if the game doesn't specifically say so.
The mini-boss here is a Jinn. He's got
two Red Skulls as minions. They're all weak against water attacks,
so just spamming the Blizzard spell is a good tactic. I do believe
Ben's magic is stronger when he's actively using his sword in battle,
but that may just be with the next version.
At any rate, once the Jinn and his
buddies are taken out, we can blast the boulder out of the way to let
Arion go home. He'll tell us what we need to know to go on from
here, but we'll have to go talk to him at home. I could have used
the Exit spell to get out of the Mine, but there's an upgrade to the
claw weapon in here, too, called the Charm Claw. This adds poison
and confusion status effects to the paralysis that the Cat Claw
caused at random.
And speaking of, I did learn that one
thing the Venus Shield protects against is paralysis. That comes in
handy because many of the monsters in this area use attacks that
cause that.
But more on that later, as it's once
again a little late for me to be up doing this, so, until next time,
stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!
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