Sunday, January 26, 2020

TEXT PLAY SIDE GAME: Final Fantasy II (Famicom 1988/PS 2003 [Origins]): Issue #012: Not Dreadnaught


OK, so maybe I won't be taking out the Dreadnaught this issue.

It's certainly not the only way my plans have changed with regard to this issue. As always, I intend to get these things out at a better rate than I do, but real life tends to chage things on me. In a way, though, the fact that my situation is what it is right now will give me a chance to do some much-needed grinding in this game. In a nutshell, winter's been hard on my hands and feet since I was a teenager, see, and the degree of severity tends to vary year to year, based on the weather and however much stress I'm under. This specific winter has shaped up to be a bad one for me, and I'm thinking it's more because of stress this year. I've got a lot of tough stuff going on this year, and considering that the National Weather Service is saying that we're coming out of the second wettest year on record, it's hard to think that it's just dry weather getting to me.

The fact that I'm going to need to grind for stats and gold for equipment in order to actually do a decent job of getting through the Dreadnaught successfully is going to come in handy right now, because I'm in a situation where having a video game that requires me to wail on things and get my party wailed on in return might actually do my mental health some good. At least it'll give me something to do while I'm working on the other self-care items I need to be working on right now.

As for why I've come to this conclusion, well, it's because I plain and simply forgot how hard this particular dungeon is. The Dreadnaught is crewed by Imperial Soldiers, though I forget what kind, that will pretty much beat the party to death if we talk to them, and they're not even the hardest enemies on the ship. There are bomb-type monsters on the ship, along with undead and magic-using enemies and some other soldiers as well, that can be hard. The bombs got me once, so I gave it another shot after using the memo file I had.

The deciding factor was when I came to some of the higher-end treasure chests here. There's one that has a Trident for Gordon, which is a handy weapon upgrade for him, and I thought I'd be safe because there was no monster with it. That turned out to be a mistake, because a chest a couple to the right of that one that has an Ice Shield in it that's guarded by a Hill Gigas. That's right, a damned Hill Gigas. Final Fantasy 9 actually tames these things way down, all things considered. Here, these things have crazy high defense and attack power that's going to be enough to pretty much one-shot most of my party members for a while yet, and that's even if I get my stats up enough to balls it again. Hopefully, it won't take me another month to get there, but the way things are going, I'm not making any promises.

In programming news, if I want to do storyline stuff in one of these, I'll do Final Fantasy 9 while I'm grinding here. I've been thinking about FF9, and I may have misspoken about how far I've actually gotten in that game, but I'll save saying more about that for a time when I've actually got my act together enough to be doing this at a more reasonable time than I am now.

Plus, I've got my usual stack of pending stuff that I need to get to, but as I said above, that'll have to come when I'm working at a more reasonable time. Hopefully, I'll have more stuff coming in February than I did in January. Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

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