zephie's game journals
screw da Marsh Cave. i did not realize fleeing from Piscodemons never works so this was entirely avoidable. as i get more of a sense of what is and isn't worth fighting in terms of XP/gil gain i'm fleeing more and more battles, and i feel my impatience growing alongside it
also i did already buy the Dark cure spell? i don't know why i thought i didn't. not an important detail but i committed an untruth on my website and i must rectify it. everything else i say is true including all the opinions
screw da Earth Cavern too!! just because this specific bend in the map has encounters at Every Single Step and i did not realize something was up until i was midway through it, i just thought i was super unlucky. the wiki points this out as "a good place to grind" which. i guess is true if not in my situation
it's taken me about ten hours to get to the point i got to in four in the remaster. a lot of that can be attributed to having to buy potions one-by-one, something that alone warranted remaking this game. even Nintendo Power recommended always stocking up on 99 of them, and it's absolutely necessary. the biggest grind of the game
i wish it was viable to have my Black Mage out in front so he's always on the world map, he is good to look at. despite the fact he is just a hat when walking through trees and also that he becomes lame when he evolves
today was a grindday. i lost a lotta progress thinking i wouldn't need to back out of this dungeon before getting to the boss. but after killing a lot of hot lizards the mighty guys of light trekked back through the perilous Mount Gluglgug and bested the vile Marilith, restoring the power of the Burn Orb to the land!! Yeowch!!!
i am learning cool and fast that Thief is apparently the worst class in the game, and i am a Final Fool for picking him. his biggest strength though is being good at running away which is enough for me. also because it was later canonized at some point that the four guys of light included a Thief and i like being told an accurate barely-story. ignore that when i was playing the remake before i named him Scootstoot
also when he goes Ninja mode he can learn Haste, doubling the attacks of a party member, which i very final foolishly did not buy for my Black Mage before maxing out his magic slots for that stage. it's cool though i need ways in which i've irreversibly screwed up my save to prevent myself from going completionist about it
today the light gang traversed the frosty frights of the Ice Cavern, leaping through cracks in the floor on purpose not by accident they knew they were there and obtained the Levistone!! why does it seem like every time i look online for help with a dungeon it mentions it being a significant step up in difficulty. can i get some smaller steps please
finally we are obtain airship.... huge relief until i immediately remember the rest of the game is designed around being able to use it as little as possible. whatever i can easily visit my old friends in Cornelia whenever i want now such as girl who dances by fountain, guard who says thing about princess, and other guard who says same thing about princess
sensing this is where a walkthrough becomes very necessary. there's a whole half of the world's worth of towns and caves i can now go to and this 1987 RPG probably didn't have level scaling totally down in that regard. first off i went to a wacky maze castle and then my game crashed. i definitely need a walkthrough because i had no idea it was going to do that
i like this game because dragons just hang out and we can talk to them. King Bahamut tells us if we bring him proof of our courage he will turn us from boys of light into men of light. dragons are the real good guys in this game, every other species either attacks me or gives me cryptic instructions, or refuses to sell me potions in bulk
after getting past the crazy crash castle i finally started to become equipped with avoid instant death. too many enemies in this game that running into can mean immediate game over it is scary (Bahamut don't look at this part) but Bahamut wants a rat's tail and these are the trials we must overcome to obtain it. no reason given as to why we can't just kill a rat
a game from 1987 having such a big plot twist is kind of crazy. you think the big dragon who promises you strength is the good guy but then surprise! he's actually the bad guy who sucks because he makes you lame!! the mages' sprite changes are especially unforgivable. making a beeline for the end of the game now as it pains me to see what has become of them
of course that involved first going back to a grinding spot and getting my newly-pubertized guys of light up to level 25. it's quite a ways away from any town so i had to stay down there for a while and it gets pretty scary without savin... not because it's hard, i can heal indefinitely through battles now for 2000 years, i am just now very aware of how fragile RetroArch my Final Fantasy Famicom cartridge is on my Family computer Computer
this game definitely has an "and then this happened" story. after becoming embiggened by the dragon we bought a fairy in a bottle from a man in a desert and then we released the fairy and then the fairy gave us underwater breathing powers and then we went underwater to defeat a kraken and save the mermaids and restore the water crystal and then they gave us the Rosetta Stone and then we took the stone to a guy who used it to teach us the Lufenian language and then the Lufenians gave us a chime and then we went to a waterfall to get
i think it's very funny that the Rosetta Stone-esque tablet needed to communicate with the Lufenians is just called the Rosetta Stone. and after some digging learning how many of the monsters in the game are straight ripped from D&D?? obviously its RPG systems were too but damn. there are very few monsters that don't appear by name and design in a D&D manual
wow they even ripped off Japanese for the Lufenian language
the one thing i wouldn't mind yoinking from a newer version of the game and shoving into this one is increased equipment storage. i'm at the second-to-last dungeon and it's throwing so many treasure chests at me, and i have spent about 80% of my time here doing research and gamer brain math to figure out what armor and weapons to throw away. it's really forcing me to think of all this as simply a means to an end, which i guess it is because it's not like there's any postgame. like i said i gotta make sure my save sucks in some way so i can easily move on when i'm done with the game
if it were just a numbers game it'd be whatever, pick the one with the bigger numbers. but the fact that so much lategame gear has situational special effects (that i would likely never consciously make use of again anyway) makes it seem like i'm constantly forced to make regretful decisions. you can carry 99 of every medicine but won't carry two rings?? get outta here. wistfully looking back on Stranger of Paradise's near-limitless storage and mountains of gear drops that i was foolish enough to complain about at the time