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Final Fantasy III Classic Jobs Part VIII
Oct. 12th, 2023 09:41 pmThis was played about two weeks after the prior session, on October 15, 2017.
I started by watching the introductory cutscene, which seems to have been too much for my streaming software or something. It ended up that the image froze on a single frame of the cutscene for several minutes. Thus, there's a 10-minute first part of the session here where you can hear me talking but can't see any of the gameplay before I realized something was wrong and restarted the stream to fix things.
I started by investigating whether I could start the Legendary Blacksmith quest to get Refia's level 99 thief weapon - a nice bonus for playing this particular version of this game. This meant a lot of wandering around talking to different important plot characters with different party leaders. I was pretty sure the whole quest line doesn't bear real fruit until later, but I figured I may as well do some of the blander part now. The absolutely bottom-tier boring gameplay and 10-minute frozen stream may have been kind of an accidental match made in heaven.
When I got the stream corrected, I was still looking for the Legendary Blacksmith for a little bit. I found her in northwestern Saronia. I followed up on that briefly and then entered the Ancient Ruins with Unei. I picked up a few things at the shops in the Ancient Ruins.
The multiplying enemies didn't seem to present much in the way of difficulty for my team. Most of our attacks were able to take out the multiplying enemies in one attack, which mostly negated the problem. Every so often they'd still multiply when hit by a mid-powered itemcast or something, but the gimmick really wasn't terribly impactful.
I was saying, this probably mattered more in the NES version of the game (and perhaps the Pixel Remaster, now) because the DS version of the game was re-balanced due to hardware limitations such that only three enemies appear in battles at a time, where it's up to 8 in the other versions.
The Ancient Ruins has no boss, and we arrived at the Invincible. The moogles that appeared had a letter from Cid, so we went back for a visit in our new ride. We beat some weak Gutsco knockoff and got the Orichalcum.
I ran into an airship battle as I approached the Cave of Shadows, which was pretty neat. There was only one, and it was easier, but it was cool. I liked getting cover fire from the airship itself. Unfortunately, the dark knight fella inside the Cave of Shadows mentioned Falgabard and I realized I wanted to head there first. That meant going backwards through the stupid gauntlet of tiny mountains with the Invincible. While I did this, I was rather critical of the game design.
I eventually got to Falgabard... but it did altogether nothing to benefit me. I got to fight a Shinobi though.
I really thought this was going to be more significant.
Back through the mountains to the Cave of Shadows. Even though it's designed, once again, to work against classes who can't wield dark swords, the enemies didn't seem particularly challenging. I was excited to run into a Death Claw here as those end up being recurring enemies in the Final Fantasy series, and this was their first appearance.
It's kind of interesting because these early games sometimes have enemies who have no relation to the rest of the series, or they do in name but there's otherwise no relationship. For example, this game's enemies named Valefor definitely didn't relate to the creature from Final Fantasy X.
Shortly after that little meeting, I found the boss, Hecatoncheir. He was introduced before the battle as a dark shadow (such useful adjective), but turned out to be a very tall and muscular fellow with a sword. I used Luneth's new-ish Quake spell for the first time here, and it was actually kind of disappointing; not really stronger than Firaga. He had very few tricks up his sleeve and went down quickly.
We saved outside of Doga's Manor (I think?) with stats like this:
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I started by watching the introductory cutscene, which seems to have been too much for my streaming software or something. It ended up that the image froze on a single frame of the cutscene for several minutes. Thus, there's a 10-minute first part of the session here where you can hear me talking but can't see any of the gameplay before I realized something was wrong and restarted the stream to fix things.
I started by investigating whether I could start the Legendary Blacksmith quest to get Refia's level 99 thief weapon - a nice bonus for playing this particular version of this game. This meant a lot of wandering around talking to different important plot characters with different party leaders. I was pretty sure the whole quest line doesn't bear real fruit until later, but I figured I may as well do some of the blander part now. The absolutely bottom-tier boring gameplay and 10-minute frozen stream may have been kind of an accidental match made in heaven.
When I got the stream corrected, I was still looking for the Legendary Blacksmith for a little bit. I found her in northwestern Saronia. I followed up on that briefly and then entered the Ancient Ruins with Unei. I picked up a few things at the shops in the Ancient Ruins.
The multiplying enemies didn't seem to present much in the way of difficulty for my team. Most of our attacks were able to take out the multiplying enemies in one attack, which mostly negated the problem. Every so often they'd still multiply when hit by a mid-powered itemcast or something, but the gimmick really wasn't terribly impactful.
I was saying, this probably mattered more in the NES version of the game (and perhaps the Pixel Remaster, now) because the DS version of the game was re-balanced due to hardware limitations such that only three enemies appear in battles at a time, where it's up to 8 in the other versions.
The Ancient Ruins has no boss, and we arrived at the Invincible. The moogles that appeared had a letter from Cid, so we went back for a visit in our new ride. We beat some weak Gutsco knockoff and got the Orichalcum.
I ran into an airship battle as I approached the Cave of Shadows, which was pretty neat. There was only one, and it was easier, but it was cool. I liked getting cover fire from the airship itself. Unfortunately, the dark knight fella inside the Cave of Shadows mentioned Falgabard and I realized I wanted to head there first. That meant going backwards through the stupid gauntlet of tiny mountains with the Invincible. While I did this, I was rather critical of the game design.
I eventually got to Falgabard... but it did altogether nothing to benefit me. I got to fight a Shinobi though.
I really thought this was going to be more significant.
Back through the mountains to the Cave of Shadows. Even though it's designed, once again, to work against classes who can't wield dark swords, the enemies didn't seem particularly challenging. I was excited to run into a Death Claw here as those end up being recurring enemies in the Final Fantasy series, and this was their first appearance.
It's kind of interesting because these early games sometimes have enemies who have no relation to the rest of the series, or they do in name but there's otherwise no relationship. For example, this game's enemies named Valefor definitely didn't relate to the creature from Final Fantasy X.
Shortly after that little meeting, I found the boss, Hecatoncheir. He was introduced before the battle as a dark shadow (such useful adjective), but turned out to be a very tall and muscular fellow with a sword. I used Luneth's new-ish Quake spell for the first time here, and it was actually kind of disappointing; not really stronger than Firaga. He had very few tricks up his sleeve and went down quickly.
We saved outside of Doga's Manor (I think?) with stats like this:
<< Start | < Previous | Index | Next >
