![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I started a new challenge on Final Fantasy (I) for the NES on January 7th, 2022. This one involved playing the game with a set of knights, each of whom were banned from one vowel. The reasoning behind this challenge is pretty abstract and has some history, so... allow me to explain. And if you don't care about explanations, just scroll down until after the embedded video.
The first bit of history that inspired this run, in a sense, is my original FF1 "Ban Something" run in Spring 2016. This was one of the runs where I was, by necessity (and choice!) I was quite involved with the GameFAQs FF1 board. As a part of that run, and the variety of other community-driven challenges that were popular around that time, I kept asking - or daring? - other people to do the challenge. And I was constantly coming up with weird varieties of rules that I wanted to impose on other users' challenges... but, at least to date, nobody in that community has taken up a community-driven "ban something" experience. I may have talked about it back then.
The idea came up again in 2017 in a thread titled, "No Letter ? Challenge". The conversation was good but it didn't result in any interesting play. At some point, probably in 2021, I did some analysis to see which alphabet-based bans would be the worst for which classes.
I think also around this time, I most likely read through Thuryl's Let's Play of Might & Magic V: World of Xeen. I loved World of Xeen back in 1994 or so and I've played it all the way through probably a couple of times since. Reading about the Great Northern Tower of the Voweless Knights might've been a little push of inspiration for this run as well. So I ran a different analysis to see what it would be like, banning different letters and comparing common consonants with the vowels. I realized that besides the relatively uncommon "U", banning the vowels could be interesting. Furthermore, I could do it with four knights, each with a different banned vowel for theming purposes.
Thus: four knights.
One is named "No A" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "A".
One is named "No E" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "E".
One is named "No I" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "I".
One is named "No O" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "O".
There is no "U", there is only me.
A few things to explain at the beginning: first of all, they're all actual knights, not fighters. This won't make a whole lot of difference, but there it is.
The reason they're knights is because of Might & Magic V's Voweless Knights, which is also why there's an image of the Slayer Knight enemy on the right side of my stream. They even have FF1 knight colours! It's an intentional tie-in, even though very few people will get the reference and even fewer would care.
Third, with the bans, I am trying to "spell out" any of the icons used to describe items in the game. So "Chain [armor icon]" is interpreted as "Chain Armor", and "Iron [gauntlet icon]" is interpreted as "Iron Gauntlet". Items without an icon, like Cloth, Rapier or Defense, are just being taken at their name. I'm basing this off FF1 names rather than modern translations or other versions like Final Fantasy Restored.
Expanding on that last point, the only equipment we would get from Coneria was as follows:
The Cap found in the Temple of Fiends, obviously, could be used by anyone other than No A. I gave it to No I, who could use the defense boost and isn't completely useless at attacking. We fought Garland at level 2, with no issues. I wasn't even really paying attention when we won.
I decided to pound Imps for a bit to get level 3 and some spending money for Pravoka before the trip out east. I let No A die during the grind - it wasn't super intentional, but I also didn't really take any steps to prevent it. It's not some terrible thing for this run. I bought some potions on my next trip into Coneria, but I said they couldn't use them during battle anyway other than No A being allows to use Pure Potions.
After our first shopping trips in Pravoka, our armor looked like this:
Part of this is because we needed more money, and part of it is because of vowels. I was going to go the weapon shop too, but after fighting the pirates I had over 800G so I could afford the Iron Armor for No E. With that, he was rather decisively our tank. Too bad we couldn't afford any weapon upgrades at all yet!
Note that No E and No I are never going to be able to hold a shield, No A and No O are never going to wear armor (other than No A's Cloth), and No E will never wear a helmet.
Sadly... on our first trip across the seas, we had a terrible encounter with Sahags and an OddEye who wouldn't let us run away.
We died and had to restart from Coneria, including doing the pirate battle over again. Our shopping was mostly the same though, other than doing it after the pirate battle. After that, I did a hard reset to use the Kyzoku encounter manipulation trick, earning some money for Pravokan weapons... and the incidental experience points than went with that. Everybody can use a Short Sword except for No O, who can benefit from a Hand Axe... and frankly, unless I'm saving up for a Silver Sword for No A, those are going to be some of the last few weapons I buy in the whole game.
I actually made a bit of a newbish error at this part; I bought a third Short Sword before a Hand Axe, which is a bit wasteful given the free Short Sword we can get very easily and early in the Marsh Cave. Please don't judge me too hard.
With all that, it ended up being quite a while before I reached Elfland, which besides the prohibitively expensive Silver Sword only offered a few small armor upgrades. I forgot to buy any Pure Potions and chose to wander outside of Elfland to earn level 5. Getting level 5 allows the characters with Short Swords to do two hits per attacks, which is a pretty big deal... and at that point I chose to go to the Marsh Cave.
Very quickly, we got the extra Short Sword that I referred to earlier. A bit before the Wizards, some Scorpions decided to help make the point that No O barely having any armor is impactful.
Now, this would've been bad regardless given that critical hits partly ignore a character's absorb rating, but that was nasty. And yet, No O survived! The Wizards were a different story. We encountered four Wizards, and we couldn't bring them all down although it was actually fairly close.
On the next attempt, we only got 2 Wizards, and it was much, much smoother. During this part of the gameplay, I was ranting about the model of dungeon design in gaming being a matter of attrition. That's an interesting thing when you're willing to just attempt a short dungeon again and again from a save point until you win; it's hard to say whether Final Fantasy's difficulty curve was truly "effective game design". Hm.
We went back to Elfland to rest up before visiting Astos. Our first encounter with Astos didn't go well. No A got erased right away, and the damage we dealt was pitiful. We held out for a long time without Astos casting a lot of damage spells, but when FIR2 and LIT2 came out consecutively, we were done.
The next battle with Astos also seemed pretty doomed. Nobody got affected by his first RUB spell, although we were badly damaged by other spells. He also afflicted us with a ton of negative status effects, with the whole party being hit by SLOW and DARK and in a couple of cases, SLEP. The Lua script I was running to display status effects ended up looking kind of cool here. Amazingly, while we were on the cusp of defeat, No A killed Astos with a 1 damage attack.
Since I could afford the Silver Sword and didn't need my money for much else, I grabbed it for No A when we returned to Elfland. We also grabbed a Copper Bracelet for No I...
...and then started the part with all the fetch questing and associated loot. I made an oversight at one point that I didn't realize at the time and put the Were Sword on No O when I should've been putting it on No I. Functionally, this makes almost no difference, so I'm going to choose not to get hung up on it. I then repeated that mistake with the Rune Sword (but, again, little impact, at least for now). The Dwarf Cave offered the Dragon Sword, which can be used by No E (or No I).
I was able to get a Silver Bracelet (in Melmond or the Marsh Cave's depths), which is a very substantial defensive upgrade for No O. Selling the extra gear I had acquired had me rethinking the alphabet, and yet I still didn't realize the error I had made with the Rune Sword. Then I bought the Iron Gauntlet for No E. Apparently I really need to work on my ABCs. Hopefully I'll re-think these goofs promptly in the next session.
Index | Next >
The first bit of history that inspired this run, in a sense, is my original FF1 "Ban Something" run in Spring 2016. This was one of the runs where I was, by necessity (and choice!) I was quite involved with the GameFAQs FF1 board. As a part of that run, and the variety of other community-driven challenges that were popular around that time, I kept asking - or daring? - other people to do the challenge. And I was constantly coming up with weird varieties of rules that I wanted to impose on other users' challenges... but, at least to date, nobody in that community has taken up a community-driven "ban something" experience. I may have talked about it back then.
The idea came up again in 2017 in a thread titled, "No Letter ? Challenge". The conversation was good but it didn't result in any interesting play. At some point, probably in 2021, I did some analysis to see which alphabet-based bans would be the worst for which classes.
I think also around this time, I most likely read through Thuryl's Let's Play of Might & Magic V: World of Xeen. I loved World of Xeen back in 1994 or so and I've played it all the way through probably a couple of times since. Reading about the Great Northern Tower of the Voweless Knights might've been a little push of inspiration for this run as well. So I ran a different analysis to see what it would be like, banning different letters and comparing common consonants with the vowels. I realized that besides the relatively uncommon "U", banning the vowels could be interesting. Furthermore, I could do it with four knights, each with a different banned vowel for theming purposes.
Thus: four knights.
One is named "No A" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "A".
One is named "No E" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "E".
One is named "No I" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "I".
One is named "No O" and can't use any spells or equipment that include the letter "O".
There is no "U", there is only me.
A few things to explain at the beginning: first of all, they're all actual knights, not fighters. This won't make a whole lot of difference, but there it is.
The reason they're knights is because of Might & Magic V's Voweless Knights, which is also why there's an image of the Slayer Knight enemy on the right side of my stream. They even have FF1 knight colours! It's an intentional tie-in, even though very few people will get the reference and even fewer would care.
Third, with the bans, I am trying to "spell out" any of the icons used to describe items in the game. So "Chain [armor icon]" is interpreted as "Chain Armor", and "Iron [gauntlet icon]" is interpreted as "Iron Gauntlet". Items without an icon, like Cloth, Rapier or Defense, are just being taken at their name. I'm basing this off FF1 names rather than modern translations or other versions like Final Fantasy Restored.
Expanding on that last point, the only equipment we would get from Coneria was as follows:
| No E | Chain Armor (no weapon) |
| No I | Small Dagger, Wooden Armor |
| No A | Cloth (no weapon) |
| No O | Rapier (no armor) |
The Cap found in the Temple of Fiends, obviously, could be used by anyone other than No A. I gave it to No I, who could use the defense boost and isn't completely useless at attacking. We fought Garland at level 2, with no issues. I wasn't even really paying attention when we won.
I decided to pound Imps for a bit to get level 3 and some spending money for Pravoka before the trip out east. I let No A die during the grind - it wasn't super intentional, but I also didn't really take any steps to prevent it. It's not some terrible thing for this run. I bought some potions on my next trip into Coneria, but I said they couldn't use them during battle anyway other than No A being allows to use Pure Potions.
After our first shopping trips in Pravoka, our armor looked like this:
Part of this is because we needed more money, and part of it is because of vowels. I was going to go the weapon shop too, but after fighting the pirates I had over 800G so I could afford the Iron Armor for No E. With that, he was rather decisively our tank. Too bad we couldn't afford any weapon upgrades at all yet!
Note that No E and No I are never going to be able to hold a shield, No A and No O are never going to wear armor (other than No A's Cloth), and No E will never wear a helmet.
Sadly... on our first trip across the seas, we had a terrible encounter with Sahags and an OddEye who wouldn't let us run away.
We died and had to restart from Coneria, including doing the pirate battle over again. Our shopping was mostly the same though, other than doing it after the pirate battle. After that, I did a hard reset to use the Kyzoku encounter manipulation trick, earning some money for Pravokan weapons... and the incidental experience points than went with that. Everybody can use a Short Sword except for No O, who can benefit from a Hand Axe... and frankly, unless I'm saving up for a Silver Sword for No A, those are going to be some of the last few weapons I buy in the whole game.
I actually made a bit of a newbish error at this part; I bought a third Short Sword before a Hand Axe, which is a bit wasteful given the free Short Sword we can get very easily and early in the Marsh Cave. Please don't judge me too hard.
With all that, it ended up being quite a while before I reached Elfland, which besides the prohibitively expensive Silver Sword only offered a few small armor upgrades. I forgot to buy any Pure Potions and chose to wander outside of Elfland to earn level 5. Getting level 5 allows the characters with Short Swords to do two hits per attacks, which is a pretty big deal... and at that point I chose to go to the Marsh Cave.
Very quickly, we got the extra Short Sword that I referred to earlier. A bit before the Wizards, some Scorpions decided to help make the point that No O barely having any armor is impactful.
Now, this would've been bad regardless given that critical hits partly ignore a character's absorb rating, but that was nasty. And yet, No O survived! The Wizards were a different story. We encountered four Wizards, and we couldn't bring them all down although it was actually fairly close.
On the next attempt, we only got 2 Wizards, and it was much, much smoother. During this part of the gameplay, I was ranting about the model of dungeon design in gaming being a matter of attrition. That's an interesting thing when you're willing to just attempt a short dungeon again and again from a save point until you win; it's hard to say whether Final Fantasy's difficulty curve was truly "effective game design". Hm.
We went back to Elfland to rest up before visiting Astos. Our first encounter with Astos didn't go well. No A got erased right away, and the damage we dealt was pitiful. We held out for a long time without Astos casting a lot of damage spells, but when FIR2 and LIT2 came out consecutively, we were done.
The next battle with Astos also seemed pretty doomed. Nobody got affected by his first RUB spell, although we were badly damaged by other spells. He also afflicted us with a ton of negative status effects, with the whole party being hit by SLOW and DARK and in a couple of cases, SLEP. The Lua script I was running to display status effects ended up looking kind of cool here. Amazingly, while we were on the cusp of defeat, No A killed Astos with a 1 damage attack.
Since I could afford the Silver Sword and didn't need my money for much else, I grabbed it for No A when we returned to Elfland. We also grabbed a Copper Bracelet for No I...
...and then started the part with all the fetch questing and associated loot. I made an oversight at one point that I didn't realize at the time and put the Were Sword on No O when I should've been putting it on No I. Functionally, this makes almost no difference, so I'm going to choose not to get hung up on it. I then repeated that mistake with the Rune Sword (but, again, little impact, at least for now). The Dwarf Cave offered the Dragon Sword, which can be used by No E (or No I).
I was able to get a Silver Bracelet (in Melmond or the Marsh Cave's depths), which is a very substantial defensive upgrade for No O. Selling the extra gear I had acquired had me rethinking the alphabet, and yet I still didn't realize the error I had made with the Rune Sword. Then I bought the Iron Gauntlet for No E. Apparently I really need to work on my ABCs. Hopefully I'll re-think these goofs promptly in the next session.
Index | Next >
