I've just gotta talk about Final Fantasy for a moment

[Chronicler]

There we are

Well that was a disappointment. Onto the dungeon I guess.

 

[Chronicler]

So this is where we start introducing environmental hazards. You lose health whenever you walk on the lava, so whatever resource you're using to heal, you're gonna use a shit ton of it in this dungeon.

Did an all monk run once, in the unmodified game. With no need to buy spells or equipment, you can basically buy as many consumables as you'll ever want, which takes care of you pretty well though most of the game, except this dungeon. You can only carry items in stacks of 99, and you can't start a second stack after it's maxed out. 99 of every kind of potion you can buy is plenty for most dungeons but this one we were actually stretched pretty thin trying to get through it.

An interesting quirk however is that monsters won't fight you on the lava, and the lava won't take you below 1hp, you you basically can't die for as long as you stay on the lava. It's only when you step off the lava and have to fight somebody in your weakened state that you're in trouble.

 

[Chronicler]

This took me a while to clue into. You get to the boss, you gonna wanna use your most powerful attack spells. These bosses all have elemental weaknesses, and that's just classic gamer shit. You hit the weakpoint for massive damage.

Don't listen to that voice. Those spells are for crowds. When you have one single powerful enemy, temper is the most broken spell in the game.

It raises somebody's attack, right? But it lasts the entire battle, unless the character gets knocked out and revived. And it stacks with itself. As near as I can tell, it stacks infinitely. Throw in some haste for double apr and you're in business!

In the unmodified game there was a pair of gauntlets you could get for your fighter that would basically just make black mages redundent in boss battles, because you could use it to cast temper on yourself. Jeff Ludwig did something about that in his mod but I forget what.

And I'm obviously being a little facetious with the "Don't listen to that voice" stuff. The game's not terribly difficult and you can get away with a lot of suboptimal play if that's how you wanna do it. It's fun to figure out more effective strategies but you should never feel confined.

 

[Chronicler]

I... don't actually remember what I do next. Beating the dungeon hasn't opened up any obvious paths. I figured this prophet in town would tell me what the next step is but he's pretty useless. Guess it's time to get exploring.

 

[Chronicler]

Okay, here we are. They gave you a canoe to get to the last dungeon, which you can use to cross rivers. Normally you can only board land from a harbour, but what they didn't tell you is that you can transition straight from your boat at sea into the canoe on a river, no harbour required, which allows you to investigate this dude's lead on the Levistone.

You don't know why you need a levistone at this point in the journey, but it sounds interesting, so it's probably useful.

 

[Chronicler]

Oh hey, mindflayers! Guess it wasn't IP Law preventing them from using the name! They were just saving it for later!

 

[Chronicler]

Now, I have no idea how you were supposed to know this except that it stands out like a sore thumb. This desert, that it conspicuously circular, small, and surrounded by lush greenland, with a path taking you to it as if it's a place of importance but with nothing there?

It's not a natural desert. It's an underground hangar for an airship, created by some ancient civilization or some shit, and the levistone you just got is like the garage door opener or something. If you go there with your levistone the earth will open up and your airship will emerge.

 

[Chronicler]

Wait, I have never in my life clued into this before.

That crown we got from the piscodemons ages ago. The one that Astos, King of the Dark Elves was gonna use to take over Elfeim? You need that crown in order to enter the Citadel of Trials.

That's presumably just there for flavor. There's no way to get to the citadel of trials without already having the crown. But does that imply that the power you find in the citadel is the power he planned to use to take over the elf kingdom?

At the end of the citadel is an item called the "Rat's Tail". Seemingly innocuous, but when you present it to Bahamut, King of the Dragons, he'll recognize it as a token of your bravery and reward you with the class upgrade.

 

[Chronicler]

Been a while since I played so I forgot the dragons actually spell out the deal with the Citadel of Trials in pretty plain english. It's a rite of passage among the dragons. When you complete the trial you're a man, and the dragon king rewards you with cool dragon powers. Anybody's free to participate in it but they don't see too many humans anymore, presumably because we had to dig up ancient technology to fly here in the first place.

The elven royal family had some people here so it seems like it might be implied the rite of passage is a part of how you ascend to the throne. In which case the literal power Astos would've gained from using the crown to participate in the trial might've been secondary to the political power he could gain, while the heir to the throne was in a magically induced slumber and unfit to rule.

In Jeff Ludwig's version of the game you start out as the class you play for the rest of the game, so the Bahamut just gives you 50 more hitpoints, which is a much milder upgrade, but still worth doing.

 

[Chronicler]

I have an inordinate fondness for this character. She's probably the cutest character in the game.

I forget where you see her story laid out, but she was a mermaid that got legs to live on the land. Now she's a dancer and she's just always so happy about all the cool stuff she can do with her legs.

 

[Chronicler]

Definitely getting to the point where it's harder for me to remember these checkpoints you have to hit for story progression, but I got the oxyale, a kind of magic water that emits oxygen, so I'm able to make some makeshift scuba suit and go deep diving in this lady's makeshift barrel submarine. Mermaids are having some kind of crisis and they need my help, and that means we're in the water temple, baby!

From what I recall this dungeon is just long. It's bigger and longer than the dungeons before it, but we're at a point where we have pretty much all the tools we need to take challenges as they come, so there's no special effort required to get through it or anything. Also I seem to recall there's a thing at the very end where the directions are incredibly confusing. Always takes me forever to find my way through to the final room.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

Hey, finally some familiar faces, Mindflayers, Bahamut, and a flying ship! Well, and that Marilith above, although I don't know if it was labeled as one. I remember they scared me me more than Demogorgon when I first met them (Baldur's Gate 2 Watcher's Keep final fight with Ascension). Too many sword arms, definitely.

It's interesting how they're covering all those different climate zones/elements in the game.

I agree, the mermaid being so happy about her legs is cute.

 

[Chronicler]

That was indeed a marilith! The Marilith? I'm not sure if it's a genus in this game or if there's just the one. She was the boss of the fire dungeon.

Lich was the boss of the earth dungeon if that means anything to you. I kind of ended up skipping past him in the thread.

 

[Chronicler]

So the trick to the level, if I recall, is that it doesn't adhere to a traditional sense of space.

There are walls like this, which prevent you from just walking around in circles infinitely, which makes you feel like you're in a room with definite limits.

But the room very much does loop back in on itself, like a mobius strip. There are times when you see something on the other side of these walls, and can only get there by running around the world in the opposite direction and finding some culvert that doesn't feel spacially connected to it at all.

 

[Chronicler]

Remember Doctor Unne? A while ago we ran into his brother. He was all like "The ancient Lufenian's spoke a language nobody understands. My brother, Unne, was always talking about it. Said he could translate their ancient texts if only he has The Rosetta Stone."

So this is the problem only Doctor Unne can solve. All the way back in Melmond. My save file says I've played about 12 hours since I encountered him but I speed up the emulation sometimes and that might mess with the clock. But we don't need to translate Lufenian just yet. We've still got mermaids to save.

 

[Chronicler]

This was honestly a surprisingly quick and painless process. The duolingo owl ain't got shit on Doctor Unne.

The fact that we learned to "speak" Lufenian is also gonna be important, because guess which ancient civilization isn't as dead as we'd believed?

 

[Chronicler]

Okay, so the lufenians used to live in the sky. They were a great and powerful ancient civilization with technology and magic far beyond what exists today. But when the elemental fiend of wind came he kicked them out of their flying castle. They use rituals to pass their memories on from one generation to the next, but it's been so long that even those memories have begun to fade, and without the power of the wind their civilization is a shadow of its former glory.

They gave this chime that'll let us into the Mirage Tower, which is a kind of like "Beam Me Up, Scotty" interface to get into their flying castle, so we can go kick Tiamat's ass and give them back their land. Or sky as the case may be.

 

[Chronicler]

Since Urdnot Wrex expressed an interest in familiar faces, we did get this Cid Namedrop. I don't honestly know if it was in the original NES version or if it was added in the remake. It definitely reads like they're trying to reference somebody we already know about. Like an MCU After Credits scene or something.

 

[Chronicler]

So, my thought has been that the "Holy" damage type is largely superfluous. It's mostly effective against undead, but fire is already effective against undead.

Now I'm encountering these Vampire Lords that cast Nullblaze, protecting them from fire damage. I'm wondering if that's one of Jeff Ludwig's changes. That feels like the kind of thing you'd find in a difficulty mod, which is kind of what Jeff Ludwig's balancing mod started out as, but it eased up a lot on the difficulty towards the end of its lifespan.

Truth be told I'd never been able to get into the mod until towards the end. The early game difficulty curve was just too extreme for me, and frankly it slowed the game to a crawl as you had to spend so much time marshalling your strength and resources just to even get started on your adventure.

 

[Chronicler]

Brief aside, there's a dagger called the Orichalcum that I recall being my most powerful rogue weapon for a pretty large stretch of the game.

It's strong, but its special property is that it "drains" health, healing you for as much damage as you do, making your rogue absurdly survivable. Gotta be careful with it though, because if you attack an undead target with it, it'll heal them and hurt you instead.

From what I recall, you only get one chance at the Orichalcum. It drops randomly off an enemy you only fight once. I thought it was supposed to be the boss of the water temple but apparently that wasn't it, since it dropped some paladin exclusive gauntlets. I'm hoping I haven't missed my opportunity here. I'm getting pretty late in the game.