Sunday, April 10, 2016

TEXT PLAY Second Run: Final Fantasy 4 (SNES, 1991): Issue #003: Caller Rydia's Search For ImpSpell


Something I forgot to mention last time is the IceRod that the party finds in the Watery Pass. I only made one copy of that so that both Rydia and Tellah, who joins the party the first time here, can have one equipped. It comes in handy for both of them to have one because there are as many monsters weak to ice magic as there are weak to lightning magic in there, and I do believe that using the rod to cast the lowest level ice spell does it for free, and sometimes it comes in handy to do it twice in a battle. Beyond that, it's not worth it to clone many of them, as they don't sell for much. It's like this for a lot of these early rod weapons, as well. In fact, should I need to come back to this part of the map later in the game, when I have Edge, I'll just use him to hork the basic Rod from an enemy in the area when I'm farming the Imp spell, if I don't get it while I'm here now.

I think I also neglected to mention that the Mad Toads in there can use the Toad spell. Cecil got spammed with it hard in a couple fights before the end there, and I just forgot to mention that before.

From where I left off, it's just a few steps to the part of the game where Damcyan Castle gets nuked by the Red Wings and Tellah buggers off to take on Baron and Golbez on his own. Once I'm through with that, I think I'll spend at least a little time farming for the Imp spell, since this is where I usually go looking for it anyway. Might as well while I'm here, right?

One thing I did a little differently this time is that I put the basic Rod back on Tellah before I went into the castle for the little cutscene where the party finds Anna dead and replaces Tellah with Edward. I'm not really sure if it affects anything later in the game, mostly because it's been so long since I've bothered to have any equipment on any party member, really, when they left the party that I just plain don't remember.

Otherwise, I just ran around in the desert around the castle for awhile, in hopes that I might wind up getting the Imp summon for my trouble, or at least some Rods from the TinyMages that are also common to the area. I didn't really get what I was looking for, but my efforts didn't exactly go unrewarded, either. I did get a Silver Ring that I put on Rydia. Too bad I'm not sure off the top of my head what drops those in the area, but I do have it narrowed down to three: Imps, StingRats, I believe, and the aforementioned TinyMages, since that was the group of monsters I got it from.

But, after getting Edward up to level 10, I decided to just get on with the plot and go ahead with the Antlion cave in the next session. Maybe that'll be more interesting than usual.

One thing I did try before going into the Antlion cave was to see what happened if I tried to go through Mount Hobbs before taking care of the Antlion and curing Rosa. The game just says the path is blocked by thick ice. I can't recall having ever tried that before, so now I know.

Going through the cave, I used the clone trick to make up ten more Darkness swords. I think I mentioned last time I did this that Edward got a weapon called the Charm Harp in the cave. I didn't really take advantage of the fact that it causes the confusion status effect on monsters about half the time it hits. The Basilisks that wind up with this status effect wind up using their Petrify effect on themselves, which takes a little longer than just killing them outright, but was an interesting change for once.

Otherwise, nothing too terribly different from last time happened the rest of the way through the cave. The same can be said of the cutscene in Kaipo with Edward and the Water Hag. On the one hand, it's a scripted battle, so there's a certain length it had to be, but at the same time, I think I got it done in the shortest time I could have, considering that the ghost of Edward's girlfriend Anna has to tell him to be strong and love the people of his nation before fading into the ether.


Now that Rosa's in the party, I think I'll start the next one of these with a little more grinding for the Imp summon in the area of Damcyan Castle before moving on with the plot. And that's where the next entry will start as well. See you then, folks.

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