FreshFeeling Gaming

My Pokémon Journey Part 3: Early 2026

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:01:35 GMT

Part 1 was an introduction, and part 2 was the tumultuous death and return of Pokémon in my life. For part 3, I'll be discussing what I've actually been doing so far this year, which is creating a pipeline of powerful pokes to pour into my kids' modern games - and my own. While I don't think this page is the place anyone would come for a guide, here's how you bring a from Generation III into a Switch-based Pokémon game. Or rather, here's how I'm doing it right now.

We're going to start with the Pokémon that I've been discussing most: Thor's Blastoise, a Gen III Weezing named Puffy, Thor's Mewtwo, F-Shady's Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts, and the Turtwig I just hatched on the Skyarrow Bridge who is named Young Stik.

As an early disclaimer: the transfer of Pokémon between the 3DS games and onward to Pokémon Home is in an odd state. The tools are official, free (mostly) and authorized but unless you have a 3DS that already downloaded Pokémon Bank and Pokémon Transporter prior to the 3DS service shutdown in April 2024, you can't access this on an unmodded 3DS. If you can still access the software by any means, the tools work. This can be a barrier to entry for some people new to this process.

It's also probably self-evident, and the games themselves provide ample warning, but any step that goes up a generation is generally a one-way transfer. Trading between Generation I and II doesn't always have this limitation, and Pokémon Home does allow transfer from Generation IX to Generation VIII with certain caveats.

Gen III - Start from a Cart: If it's from Pokémon Colosseum or Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, transfer it to a cartridge-based Generation III game that has trading unlocked. Some Generation III games required a certain level of completion to be able to trade with other games. This requires a GameCube-compatible link cable. I did this with F-Shady's Imbruglia and the MATTLE Ho-oh a long time ago.

Gen III to IV - Pal Park: Using a DS or DS Lite and a copy of a Generation IV game that has beaten the Elite Four and gained access to the Pal Park, put your GBA cartridge in the GBA slot. Pal Park works like it always has: select exactly 6 Pokémon from the storage in the GBA cartridge, then run around and catch them in different biome-themed areas. These aren't battles; you can't lose or fail, but it's smart to have a Pokémon with Surf for this since you need to catch all 6 Pokémon, including any that live in water, in order to finish the transfer. Once you've caught all 6, save the game. There is no in-game cost to using this, and there's also a minor prize of a berry each time you do it. Note that Pal Park can only be populated once per day on each Generation IV game. This transfer method does allow you to transfer items, including cloned items, from Generation III to Generation IV.

Thor's Blastoise, Puffy, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh and Emeralts migrate to the Pal Park.

Within Gen IV - Pokéwalker: I actually haven't tried using my Pokéwalker this year! I'll almost certainly have to replace the battery at the very least if I want to use it again. Luckily, the IR used for Pokéwalker is built into the HeartGold / SoulSilver cartridges so this will work in any model of DS. You can transfer from the Pokéwalker on the main menu of these games.

Gen IV to V - Poké Transfer: Using two DS-family systems (DS, DS Lite, DSi, 3DS, etc.) and a copy of a Generation V game that has obtained the National Pokédex, go to the Poké Transfer Lab on Route 15. Speak to the person there to attempt to use the Poké Transfer and select 6 Pokémon to transfer. Then, on the other DS, make sure it has the Generation IV game you want to transfer from, but don't start the game. Once the transfer is started, do DS Download Play to play a super annoying touchscreen-driven minigame. When you win, the Pokémon are transferred into boxes in the Generation V game. This will not transfer held items. The game is scored, and it is unfun enough that you would expect there to be prizes, but there aren't any.

Setting up the Poké Transfer, with the broken DS Lite with the Gen V game in it on the left, and the 3DS with the Gen IV game in it on the right.

This minigame basically sucks; the good news is that it's hard to lose.

Within Gen V – Dream Radar: While the Dream World no longer exists, you can still play Pokémon Dream Radar to catch several species of Pokémon with their hidden abilities. When you finish, you can send the results to Pokémon Black 2 or White 2, and receive them by selecting “Unova Link” on their main menu, and then “Nintendo 3DS Link”.

This game is both a bit more fun and a bit more rewarding than the Poké Transfer minigame.

Here, in addition to the seven Pokémon named above, we're adding an un-nicknamed Slowpoke, Porygon, Hoothoot, Igglybuff, and Munna who were all caught in Dream Balls and should have hidden abilities. If you like nicknaming Pokémon as much as I do, you should know that they can only be named by their OT from Black 2 or White 2 bringing them to the Name Rater in Castelia City.

At this point, we've got Thor's Blastoise, Puffy the Weezing, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts, Young Stik and our five new Dream Radar friends all in a single storage box, ready to transfer out of Pokémon Black 2.

Gen I, II or V to VI or VII - Poké Transporter: With either a Generation V game cartridge inserted OR any 3DS Virtual Console Generation I or II game, launch Poké Transporter. When you select one of these games, it will transport every Pokémon in Box 1 of that game (even if you've renamed that box, so be careful!) into a box in Pokémon Bank called “Transport Box”. To do this more than once, you have to access Pokémon Bank and empty all Pokémon from the Transport Box. I've intentionally made my original "Box 1" into my "Extras 1" box, starting my living dex in these games on the original "Box 3".

Moving Gen V Pokémon into Bank using Transporter, and then moving them out of the Transport Box in Bank.

The transfer from Generations I and II is really strange, because Pokémon stats and mechanics have changed a lot in that time (the biggest change was between Generations II and III). The stats of the transferred Pokémon get altered considerably; it's actually kind of neat how the Pokémon data structure has changed gradually over time in a way that each of these transfer processes has incrementally contributed to, but the Generation I → VII transfer does it in one, gigantic leap. Although all of the supported games will deposit these Pokémon into Pokémon Bank, unlike Pokémon transported from Generation V, the ones from Generation I and II are not compatible with Generation VI. Nothing will move from Generation I or II into Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire.

Gen VII and Older to Home: Pokémon Bank has an export to Pokémon Home feature built into it, as long as both instances are associated with the same Nintendo account (or maybe it's a Trainer Central account? I have trouble remembering the difference.). It works on a full-box basis, so move all the Pokémon you want to transfer forward into specific boxes and remember them so they can all be transferred. There are actually a few ways to do this: you can do a two-sided version of it using a key on your 3DS to specify which boxes to transfer, or if you don't have access to your 3DS it can be initiated on the Switch or mobile versions of the Pokémon Home app – but this will literally import your entire bank's contents at once rather than letting you specify which boxes to transfer. This latter option is faster and easier but not ideal if you're still actually using Pokémon Bank.

I happened to do this through the mobile version of Pokémon Home, but despite the startling lack of feature parity this is also entirely doable using the Nintendo Switch version. Unfortunately, this particular feature is not free! It is only available for subscription-paying users of Pokémon Home.

Pokémon GO to Home: This transfer is a little bit like the Poké Transporter in that it takes a specific, selected set of Pokémon from Pokémon GO and moves them to a temporary holding space that you have to empty manually. Once you've connected the accounts on your phone, you go to settings in Pokémon GO and select to transfer them to Home. After this completes, you get candy for each as if they were transferred to the professor, and then you need to finish the process by accessing Pokémon Home - you can't transfer again until you've received the previous batch. As soon as you open Pokémon Home, you get a notification saying, “One or more Pokémon have been transferred from Pokémon GO”, and then they get imported into successive blank spots in Home.

Despite the gigantic logos suggesting the opposite, the first two images here are from Pokémon GO and the last one is from the mobile version of Pokémon Home.

Unlike the transfer from Bank, this works just fine with the unpaid version of Pokémon Home. It's free, from both the Pokémon Home end and the Pokémon GO end. However, the unpaid version of Home only has one box with 30 spaces. Right now the paid version has 200 boxes, or 6000 spaces; there's no option between 30 and 6000, which I think is pretty funny.

Pokémon GO to Let's Go: There's a foible of Pokémon: Let's Go, which I guess is considered a Generation VII game, in that Pokémon from Pokémon Home can only be returned to Let's Go if they are originally from a Let's Go game. Thus, it's sometimes beneficial to transfer from GO to Let's Go instead of doing the much easier transfer from GO to Home (since that makes these Pokémon unusable in Let's Go). This is a direct connection between your Pokémon GO app and account and your Pokémon Let's Go save file that can be used at the GO Park in Fuchsia City.

There's also a bit of setup for this transfer, but the in-game guide works pretty well for it. The official web-based resources are slightly out-of-date right now, where the menus in Pokémon GO have clearly changed over time. As well, it wasn't immediately apparent to me that the way you start the transfer is by clicking the little Nintendo Switch icon at the top-right of the Pokémon list view. In brief, on both your phone and your Switch game, there's a "setup" you need to do and then the "transfer", but these closely-related and interdependent features aren't in the same place on either piece of software - so you'll be muddling through menus a little bit. But it's really not that bad.

Getting these Pokémon in the GO Park requires re-catching your own Pokémon with your own berries and balls, unlike the Pal Park and other transfer mechanisms which don't consume in-game resources. Frankly, this is a bit annoying in a game with relatively slow and limited cashflow, but it was the best way for me to get things like Alolan forms and some of the version exclusives. The game also isn't particularly balanced around the Pokémon from GO; it's not uncommon that they come with such high CP that you could spend a dozen Ultra Balls catching something relatively ordinary. This Nidorina and Vileplume weren't too bad, though.

Pokémon from Pokémon GO that are moved into Let's Go can then be traded via Pokémon Home's GTS to other Let's Go players.

Home to Modern Games: As of right now, Pokémon Home will allow you to move Pokémon to and from Pokémon: Let's Go (although only Let's Go-originating Pokémon can move into it) and every Generation VIII and Generation IX game. That said, modern Pokémon games don't have models for every Pokémon ever so many of them can't be used in every game. There are also a lot of unsupported moves in the more modern games, so Pokémon's moves tend to get altered considerably if you swap them between games – usually to their default learned moves for their levels. (The last generation with a completely playable National Dex was VII.)

Transferring between Home and Let's Go, Pikachu!
The red slashed circle icon indicates that Pokémon can't be transferred to this game, in this case because they don't originate from Let's Go.

Besides breaking out the Pokéwalker again, I've been doing all of these things this year. There's a continuous transfer path from Gen III → IV → V → Bank (VI/VII) → Home (VIII/IX), and another from Gen I & II → Bank (VII) → Home (VIII/IX). It is… rather time-consuming! And it may require a lot of hardware.

There are a few nice infographics floating around lately related to how Pokémon can be transferred among games and related systems now… where the thing that worries me is how it'll be impacted when Nintendo chooses to end the Pokémon Bank service. Given the recent Switch ports of FireRed and LeafGreen I worry that could be fairly imminent. Everyone ought to take care with these infographics since they tend to require updates at least once per year.

This infographic is still pretty accurate from CengizMan on Reddit in 2024.

I did start playing Pokémon GO with more-or-less daily regularity as of late December, and I still have my living dexes (and the breeding capacity that comes with that) in Pokémon Diamond, Platinum, HeartGold, White, Black 2, and Y. But I couldn't tell my kids that I could get them any cloneable or breedable Pokémon they want in this state, right? I had still never beaten my copies of Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon Sun, or Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!

Beating Sun

It felt like I should do these in order. I tried to play Pokémon Omega Ruby, but then I found that although I could see the Pokémon from that game in Pokémon Home, the game wouldn't run. Pokémon Sun worked, though. I picked up my save from literally Alola Route 1 and beat it including Alola's regional dex and most of a living national dex by the end of February. The only real barrier was a Drampa requiring a trade from Moon/Ultra Moon, and at the time this was my only Generation VII game, so I had to find someone to do this. Even this still left me with a small number of gaps that made me think I should finish Omega Ruby first.

Beating Omega Ruby

Omega Ruby still wasn't working. I found out that there's a certain generation of 3DS games – a few titles in particular – really prone to developing read errors. Oddly, this experience of Pokémon Bank still being able to access stored Pokémon while the game won't run by any means is pretty well known. I tried a lot of cleaning and alternative fixes that my modded 3DS made possible, even letting the 3DS Cartridge Fixer Tool run for (I'm not kidding) ten full days. Nothing was working. Eventually, I decided to get a digital copy of Omega Ruby (which I legitimately owned but could not play) by other means. Despite substantial effort, I couldn't figure out a way to salvage my existing save data, so I used Pokémon Bank to transfer every single Pokémon I had caught in my original playthrough to a brand new playthrough. I then beat Omega Ruby end-to-end in March and early April, including a finished living dex. Starting with a ton of partly-trained Pokémon from the prior playthrough and even transferred from other games made this rather easy.

Beating Let's Go, Pikachu!

In between playing the 3DS games, every so often I have been going back to Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!, and the two-player mode means I can play that with my kids. My oldest son, Wyldstar, joined me for catching Zapdos and we had a heck of a time with it. My son had an experience of Zapdos being a jerk to catch with me in Let's Go and Articuno being a jerk to catch in GO; Moltres is the only bird that has not wronged him (...yet?). He has insisted he wants to be there with me when I eventually do Articuno and Moltres. This has sort of stalled my progress with 6 badges, but I've had lots of opportunity to use the GO Park to such an extent that I've nearly completed that living dex, too.

This is sort of like a "living dex". Missing some birds!

I still need to finish this one, but it ought to be quick if I can concentrate.

Beating Pokémon Yellow

To fill out the last bits of my living dex in Pokémon Sun (and maybe other future games), I thought I should have an endgame save in Generation I and II on my 3DS. As of this writing, I am 4 badges into Pokémon Yellow. I've never actually played a Pokémon game this old, and it's... not my favourite. But it is for the greater good!

The Future

Pretty soon, I'll be done this backlog of games from Generations I-VII! The problem, of course, is that now that my kids are into Pokémon the collection keeps growing. We recently got Pokémon Legends: Arceus as well as Pokémon Violet's DLC. We'll almost certainly end up with Pokémon Legends: Z-A before the new one comes out next year, too.

My goal, I guess, is to have a reasonably complete living dex for all the games I own! I've just got, like, 3 or 4 more to go. Then I can start acting like a normal person and play a Final Fantasy game.

Back when World of Warcraft was very mainstream, I had three close friends playing it regularly. I used to make fun of them, because I found it so silly that they had commitments to the game and their fellow players where I told them playing WoW was like having a second job but you paid to work. From my outsider perspective, it really felt that way. Well, sometimes when I'm playing Pokémon in such a goal-oriented way with so much repetition, I'm sure it comes across more like duty or… addiction. However, it's not an embellishment that I have a great deal of fun catching, breeding and levelling up these little idiots – even better when friends and family are part of the experience. I haven't really discussed that, but besides my kids it's come to light that several of my colleagues from work are also big Pokémon fans and we've had a lot to talk about.

Even my older friends are still pretty interested! I recently offered Thorassic to give him back his Blastoise, Mewtwo, etc. from ~18 years ago.

We made it! All present in Pokémon Home:
Thor's Blastoise, Puffy the Weezing, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia the Lugia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts the Gardevoir, Young Stik the Turtwig, and the five new friends from Dream Radar.

He wasn't interested. :(

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My Pokémon Journey Part 2: 2010-2025

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:52:07 GMT

Picking up from part 1, this discussion of my history with Pokémon games starts with the part of my adulthood where I started acting like a more traditionally-viewed adult. I met my wife in 2010 and, while it's little to do with this blog, that has pretty much been a great thing. It does mean, however, that I wasn't as immersed in gaming as a hobby. Like a lot of couples, we did a sort of parallel play where we had to binge watch her favourite shows and then, reciprocally, we had to binge watch my favourite shows. I watched Buffy, and she watched Airbender; you may judge for yourself who came out ahead. Either way, if I were a bachelor that might've been gaming time.

Generations V and VI

Pokémon Black and White came out in early 2011. At this time, one of my nephews was into gaming so for his birthday I got him Pokémon Black and got myself Pokémon White so we could trade - although he wasn't interested in dex completion and mostly just wanted to battle, so this was a raw deal for me. My starter for this one was an Oshawott named Washout. I understood the controversy in the fact that the Unova regional dex was entirely new Pokémon and that transferring was locked to the postgame, but I think I really liked the Unova games. I adored the animated sprites.

The transfer process between Generation IV and V is somewhat awkward, requiring 2 DS-family systems. I think I borrowed a DS from a friend to do a bit more of this. Despite the relative lack of gaming time, I had the overwhelming majority of my Pokémon White living dex done by the time the sequels were announced.

My living dex from Pokémon White.

Between the Unova game releases, though, we had our wedding and welcomed our first child. It was a busy time in my life! I remember a few months after my son was born he was sleeping in a baby rocking chair thing while I played Pokémon. Babies mostly wake up kind of gradually, so I remember him slowly sputtering awake and me being like, "c'mon, baby, this egg's about to hatch, gimme 3 more minutes!". I've developed a deep-seated association between the anxious feeling of having a stirring baby and crossing the Skyarrow Bridge.

I biked a lot of locations in Black 2, and the ~~Sleepbaby~~ Skyarrow Bridge is one of them!
Young Stik is born.

I also had a bit of routine when it came to Pokémon Dream World. I would regularly do the thing where I'd make a Pokémon go to sleep, and then daily at work on my lunch break I'd do whatever there was to do in the dream world, then go home at the end of the day and claim any rewards. It was mostly a good system for the relatively short lifespan of Pokémon Dream World.

While my wife was still on maternity leave and my son was a couple of months old, she invited a mom friend and their son, who was about 2 years old, over. She would later describe the scene to me: He walked into the empty room, completely homed in on my DS Lite on a table, picked it up, and slammed it down onto the floor. The screen didn't come apart completely, but it broke on the non-cable side. Not ideal!

Can you tell that the top screen is quite a bit less clear than the bottom screen?

While I wasn't extremely keen on the 3DS when it was new (in part because I loved the original DS' GBA slot), buying a new DS Lite in 2012 wasn't easy, so my wife bought me a 3DS. I think it may have actually been for Father's Day in 2012; literally my first Father's Day present.

Well, now I could use my partly-broken-but-still-mostly-functional DS Lite and my 3DS to transfer Pokémon between Generation IV and V. So that's... nice?

When Black 2 and White 2 released, I switched colours and went with Black 2. I was somewhat grateful to have access to the 3DS after all because I legitimately found Pokémon Dream Radar pretty fun. I still play and enjoy it every so often, I just wish there was a bit more variety in the catchable Pokémon. As sequel games, I thought Black 2 and White 2 were really clever in their redesign of the Unova region.

After my foundational time with Gen IV and Gen III, although my life was busier at this point, the Gen V games were probably when I took the metagame most seriously. I knew enough to make good teams and train them effectively. My wife's maternity leaves may have contributed to me still having some time for hobbies. I tried to accumulate some shinies and ensure I had certain Pokémon with hidden abilities, and then I'd strategically breed and carefully manage EVs as if I were building a competitive team. I never actually played in a competition, but it's fun stomping the regular postgame.

These are just a couple of my fairly well-managed, almost-competitive Pokémon from White.

My favourite themed team was in Black 2 where I decided to make a team themed around Warrior Cats: of course, there weren't really very many cat-like Pokémon at this time, so a few vague equivalences had to be used as stand-ins, such as Bluestar being an Espeon. Given the suboptimal species in play, this team was by no means optimized for competitive battle, but I put some serious work in and, again, they were quite powerful (and fun!) for any in-game battle. Luxray kind of sucks, but Bram(ble)claw was my favourite anyway.

I'm not a hardcore completionist with everything, but I had been enjoying the living dexes I had cultivated in so many games to this point. It was somewhat harder to find the time to do this with my growing family, so while I was still finishing Black 2 and eventually Pokémon Y when it came out, I was mostly on a break from modern console games during this period. I almost skipped the 8th console generation, and never ended up getting a PlayStation 3 or 4 despite being a Final Fantasy nut.

My living dex from Pokémon Black 2,
followed by Thor's Blastoise, Emeralts, Imbruglia, and the other friends we've been transferring through the ages

I did play Pokémon Y when it came out - and bought that same nephew a copy of Pokémon X, although we never really played together - but I honestly have very little memory of the game. Besides the road by the daycare and the big chateau where I biked back and forth getting eggs, I can barely navigate that region at all now. I think with the balance of time going to my family I might've played that entire game in a half-asleep state. I don't particularly remember my early use of Pokémon Transporter and Pokémon Bank, but I've got a living dex in Pokémon Y too, so it must have worked adequately for me. At this point I was still moving Pokémon like Emeralts, Thor's Mewtwo and the MATTLE Ho-oh from Generation III into Generation IV with Pal Park, into Generation V with one broken DS Lite and one 3DS, and then into Generation VI via Transporter.

I found a good method to take screenshots for Gen IV and Gen V but not Gen VI, so these happen to be from Black 2.
Of course, they were able to be carried forward.

My Pokédecline and Pokébreak

When Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire came out in late 2014, I was given Pokémon Omega Ruby as a Christmas present. I had two kids now! I didn't play much of the game, sort of petering out after 4 gyms or so.

When Pokémon Sun and Moon came out in late 2016, I was given Pokémon Sun as a Christmas present. I had three kids now! I played this one even less. I do have an early, special memory related to this one though in that I was connecting with my own students about the game for the first time, especially in a course I was running in early 2017. I was still on Alola Route 1 and one student offered me their first shiny: a beautiful, golden Magikarp, which I've still got!

The shiny Magikarp I received as a gift in 2017.
I recently shared with that student, who graduated ~8 years ago, that I still had it!

By this point, I accepted I pretty much could not manage the time for Pokémon anymore, at least not the way I actually wanted to play it. I still liked the games... but my career was taking shape and I had the kind of sleep schedule a person with babies and toddlers has. I guess I started playing challenge/variant games with intent around 2015, too, but the actual occasions that I played these were sparse.

I was a late adopter to the Wii U, and part of what drew me into that was definitely Super Mario Maker, of course. Not only is that game generally great and appealing to my interest in user-generated content, but it was a great thing to play with my kids as they started to play games. The things I found time to play just weren't Pokémon.

We got a Nintendo Switch much sooner after its release, in late 2017. When Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! came out in late 2018, my kids seemed interested, so we got that pretty soon after release, too. I only played up to Cerulean City, and my kids only got about that far, too. I don't know if it's a matter of attention, or the fact that they weren't strong readers yet, or just having other games available, but despite Nintendo's best efforts at making a very accessible game, it didn't stick.

I had also very briefly dabbled in Pokémon GO. Apparently I first played in early 2019, but at the time I had a pretty limited mobile data plan so I barely got into it at all.

Some arbitrary pictures taken with my kids in Pokémon GO from early 2019.

Overall, while there were little bits of experimentation... I didn't really play Pokémon for 9 years, from early 2017 to December 2025.

My Pokérenaissance

So, how have I ended up playing nothing but Pokémon games for at least the last four months? And with a fair level of dedication? That was also somewhat of a gradual thing. It started with getting two of my sons a Miyoo Mini in Summer 2024. My middle child loves cute little guys in general, and somehow eventually started playing Pokémon Sapphire in Summer 2025. He was playing among a group of friends at the time and kept catching Pokémon and naming them after his friends, which was fun.

My kids may be gamers.

On somewhat of a whim, when we were visiting Montreal in mid-November 2025, we popped into the world's largest EB Games and my son decided to buy Pokémon Violet. At the time I actually thought this would be a colossal waste of money since he didn't really play Let's Go, Pikachu!. It wasn't; he enjoyed it.

Then, over the Christmas holiday break in 2025, my family all got sick with various minor maladies. Nobody in my immediate family had bought each other any video games and we were stuck inside. The grandparents had got games as presents for my kids but because of our illness we couldn't see them for several days, so we couldn't receive those presents. What did the kids decide to play with their extra time? Pokémon Violet.

All of the kids were playing it, and occasionally watching Pokémon videos on YouTube, and really enjoying that intense discussion about how to play the game and different approaches they were taking just like my friend and I did in Summer 2007. That's what made me say it:

"I'm pretty sure I can clone legendaries in Emerald and transfer them into the modern games, if you were interested..."

Yeah, they were into that. Upon researching a little bit, I found the following:

I hadn't played Pokémon Sun since support for Pokémon Bank was added - but now Pokémon Bank can be used with Generation VI and Generation VII games.
Pokémon Bank (and Pokémon Transporter) are still functioning, and in fact while it used to have a subscription cost, it's free now.
Pokémon Bank has an easy export to the new storage and transfer system, Pokémon Home.
My original DS Lite with the broken screen hinge still partly works, with a very fuzzy top screen.
Pokémon GO also allows exports to Pokémon Home.
My 3DS - which is hacked because of my friend's insistence that I play Fire Emblem Awakening - allows me to enable Mystery Gifts for event Pokémon in Generations IV through VII fairly freely.

So, it is still possible to clone and export Pokémon from Generation III into modern games like Pokémon Violet in 2026. Possible - but not simple.

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My Pokémon Journey Part 1: 2007-2010

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:49:22 GMT

Well, it's been nearly four months with no posts, which is pretty unusual for me! While it's not uncommon for me to go four months without streaming, generally there's some kind of weird gaming I can document or something. That's not really the case this time.

Instead, the reason that I haven't updated at all is Pokémon! I sort of foreshadowed this in my Year in Review for 2025 post. One of my children bought Pokémon Violet in November 2025, and then we didn't get a lot of brand new games until near the end of last year's Christmas season. Consequently, during all of our time off, suddenly all of my kids were playing Pokémon Violet and even other Pokémon games. One of my sons had also been playing GBA Pokémon games on their Miyoo Mini.

With the renewed interest in Pokémon games all around me, I said to my kids, "I'm pretty sure I can clone legendaries in Emerald and transfer them into the modern games, if you were interested..." - and they were. Suddenly, I was cloning in Generation III, breeding in Generations IV and V, trying to recover save data in Generation VI, and even newly playing Pokémon GO, all at once!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ought to start at the beginning.

While there's a personal beginning, I'll start by saying Pokémon came into existence when I was a young adolescent, and I was in my mid-20s the first time I ever played a Pokémon game. I had been a Nintendo Power kid, subscribing first between 1991 and 1995 or so, and then doing another little stint to support a kid's fundraiser around 2008. I was somewhat aware of Pokémon in the public consciousness but I associated it with bad animation, repetitiveness, "kiddiness", and the predatory nature of mass media. Naturally, I opposed this as part of the establishment during my edgy teenage years, and never really paid Pokémon any attention at all for a long time. I legitimately didn't even realize it was an RPG!

I don't know what it was about the year 2007 that changed this for me. I think it may have been that this was the era when I was enraptured by TASes, and seeing the early Pokémon Sapphire runs by kirbymuncher and FractalFusion opened the eyes to the style of gameplay and the interesting mechanics in the background.

My First Pokémon Game

I am pretty sure the day I bought my DS Lite with Pokémon Diamond as my first Pokémon game was July 29th, 2007. I had a week's vacation in the mid-summer at the same time as a close friend. We were going away to a cottage at a beach, but I thought I should have a fun, new gaming option in case there were rainy days. When I bought my DS Lite, my friend bought herself a DS Lite and Pokémon Pearl at the same time.

My first starter was Turtwig, and my friend's first starter was Chimchar. She named her Chimchar "Turkey" which I found funny just because it's quite literally not, and this is oddly memorable to me, moreso than my own first Turtwig's name, which was Stikdawg.

At the time, I said something like, "If you're going to call your monkey 'Turkey', what are you going to call your eventual turkey?". Eventually - a couple days into playing - we did the thing where one of us (her) reset the game 5 times so that we each started with a full starter trio. Eventually, I got a Chimchar from her named "Donkey" - like a continuation of the "animals that end in 'key' that are not 'monkey'" phenomenon. Donkey was also a core part of my first team.

Though in modern times I hear a lot of complaint about Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, mostly about the weird Pokédex where there’s basically a single fire type in the whole game, I still really enjoyed playing it. It was also really fun having a close friend playing the game and being able to trade and discuss.

The game also had pretty good online features, like GTS and online trading. I’ve got a specific memory of doing a trade with an online-only acquaintance I’d known for over 10 years and never spoken with. I had the volume off on my DS, and didn’t realize that when you did online trades, your DS’ mic automatically goes live and your sound transmits to the other person. I had been idly singing to myself as we traded and didn’t know at all that they were hearing me sing! It was quite a shock getting IRC messages about my singing afterward. While it was unintentional, this was effectively the first game I ever played with voice chat.

Catching ‘Em All – Generation IV Part 1

I understood that there was some kind of imperative that I gotta catch 'em all, so I decided to do that. Prior to the release of Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver this was quite a daunting task! It would require getting multiple GBA games, and either using DS features to access new post-game Pokémon or importing directly from those games. Well… in for a penny, in for a pound.

The second game I got was LeafGreen. I enjoyed that a lot, too, and used its dongle features and imports to fill out my original Pokémon Diamond dex considerably. As well, I had a couple of friends who had either FireRed or LeafGreen, so we did a lot of trading between those to fill gaps in both. This included my friend Thorassic's original starter Blastoise and his Mewtwo, among others. The images here are dated a little bit later, and that's for a reason that'll be discussed shortly.

Next, I got a used copy of Pokémon Colosseum. While it’s a different style of game, and it plays really slowly in general, I found the battles quite a bit more strategic and engaging than the other games I had played to date, and the tension of needing to catch shadow Pokémon as the only source of new allies was actually really exciting. I’m honestly confused that the Pokémon games never really returned to this format more recently, since the battles in the GameCube titles felt like they had the highest stakes in the series. The animations in this game honestly still kind of impress me a bit; I don’t find the more modern 3D games to have distantly better battle animations and the different Pokémon species show a ton of personality. The developers were really clever with the way the camera would cut. It’s quite a cool game.

Anyway… I took purified shadow Pokémon from Colosseum, traded them into LeafGreen, and moved some of those forward into Diamond. This included the MATTLE Ho-oh that you could earn by completing Mt. Battle.

That, unfortunately, still left gaps in my Pokédex. I didn’t have a source for some of the Generation III Pokémon – notably the legendaries. To fill the gaps, the next game I got was Pokémon Emerald (which wasn't so hideously expensive in 2007-2008). To date, I've never actually played Ruby or Sapphire myself, and I don't feel bad about that: Emerald is an excellent third version. I had already seen Sapphire in those TASes, but Emerald remixed the original games enough to keep things interesting for me. And it was!

Gotta Clone ‘Em All

Partway through completing Pokémon Emerald - during this phase in my life in which I spent tons of time in my overnight desk job perusing Bulbapedia and Serebii - I learned about the Battle Tower cloning glitch. I wanted to beeline completion of Pokémon Emerald with urgency so that I could make use of this. This resulted in one of my favorite Pokémon gameplay memories: the tale of Emeralts the Gardevoir more-or-less soloing Hoenn's Elite 4 below level 50. It really was epic although I have to admit I probably had to load saves several times to do it. Emeralts would go into each fight and use Double Team 6 times, then Calm Mind 6 times, and then sweep with Psychic. It took some attempts, but probably not as many as you might think! It was awesome. Of course, there are some dark-types in Hoenn's Elite 4, but Future Sight being indirect as it is allowed Emeralts to blow through them, too.

Once I got access to the Battle Frontier in Emerald, I could clone various legendaries from LeafGreen, FireRed, Colosseum and Emerald at will, transfer them into Pokémon Diamond, and put them on the GTS to essentially get whatever I wanted – as long as I had seen it. I even got a Mew from Hayley in My Pokémon Ranch.

This cloning technique is why I had differently-dated Pokémon from Thor in FireRed and a differently-dated Emeralts. I had different copies of the same unique or fully-evolved Pokémon and I imported them into various games over time. Some games discard certain information about the original games when Pokémon are moved between them, and in the case of these screenshots from Generation IV games, they use the dates the Pokémon were received.

The only real problem here? Lugia.
Would you believe I bought Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness expressly for the purpose of getting and purifying shadow Lugia? Cuz I did. I didn’t like Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness nearly as much as Pokémon Colosseum. Given that the battle system is essentially the same, it’s hard to say why that is, but the main character looks like a dork instead of Colosseum’s action hero, Wes. Wes starting with a paired Espeon and Umbreon adds further coolness points. I muddled through Gale of Darkness anyway and got the Lugia. For some reason, I named it Imbruglia, a choice that haunts me today as every Lugia I've cloned out of Emerald into modern games is still called that. You might even say I'm torn about that choice.

I’ll also say: I had already transferred my MATTLE Ho-oh from Colosseum from LeafGreen into Diamond, so to have a Ho-oh to clone in Emerald I actually completed Pokémon Colosseum end-to-end a second time. If everything in that game moved 50% faster it might be my favourite, so I didn’t mind too much.

Given my access to Emerald’s Battle Tower cloning glitch, I went ahead and made sure every that every cartridge had a copy of every full-evolved Pokémon and every legendary. Although, actually, I still don’t have a Generation III Latias because I stupidly picked “blue” in Emerald and among our friend group somebody transferred the Latias from Sapphire to a newer game.

I wish I had better means to capture this, but at least for now I don't.
Note the extra Blastoise, Weezing, Mewtwo, Lugia, Ho-oh, and Gardevoir.

With every evolutionary line through Generation III available, I then mass-bred Pokémon, mostly in Sinnoh's Solaceon area (it is cozy), and completed a "living dex" in LeafGreen, Diamond, and my eventual used copy of Platinum.

In some cases, I would just pass rarities like Mew and Manaphy around among games since I could get one off the GTS as long as I had seen it once. The mythicals I had were very gradual and probably not fully legitimate, although they were traded to me, so who knows? Personally, I find no problem with less-legitimate means to get things that are fully inaccessible in the games anyway. I guess we all draw our own lines on that... but let's recognize this is a blog full of romhacks and cheats and stuff. Very little of what's here is "pure", but there are always rules.

As the song had demanded, I caught 'em all... again, and again, and again.

Catching 'Em All - Generation IV Part 2

By the time Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver were released in North America in 2010, I pretty well had access to whatever Pokémon I wanted, but I still played my copy of HeartGold to full completion and did another living dex there. Despite having easy means to slowly chip away at the Pokédex completion, I instead embraced all the new and interesting ways to catch cross-generational Pokémon, like the customizable Safari Zone. I also really enjoyed the Pokéwalker feature and used that a lot myself, and also enjoyed attaching it to my niece and nephews when I was feeling lazy.

I played a lot of Pokémon in the years of 2007-2010. In those years, I was a young adult with few responsibilities. 2010, however, is the year that I met my now-wife… so, to end all forebodingly: that’s the end of part 1.

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Year in Review: 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:40:42 GMT

Another one down, eh? I did some things.

Variant Playthroughs Done in 2025

Valkyrie Profile (PS) with Classic Jobs:
I had been talking about doing this for a long time! The setup was harder than I expected but it was okay... although the game didn't always want to behave under the conditions I forced upon it. The fact that special strategies were needed to bypass several bosses (due to a partly documented bug) actually made the playthrough challenging and interesting. It was a bit on the slow side, but I'm glad I did this.
Final Fantasy II (GBA) with Jobs 2025:
This was another Four Job Fiesta spin-off event facilitated by RevenantKioku, and just a nice, simple thing in terms of implementation. I enjoyed this; it's another one of those funny cases where it may actually improve the game in general. My favourite aspect was carrying job restrictions into the Soul of Rebirth bonus content.
Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster (Steam) Four Job Fiesta Volcano:
After a bit of a break, I did the actual Four Job Fiesta for the first time in several years. The Volcano variant was a nice way to not get stuck with knight and white mage (which are fine, but... played out for me).
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster (Steam) Side Quest Challenge:
This one required a fairly elaborate helper app that one of my kids helped with, as well as a lot of community involvement that made it pretty fun. That said, it's a challenge in name only: it's an incredibly easy playthrough, even with 0.5x experience enabled throughout. I had a few favourite quests, like the one where I had to play with the controller upside down, and then one where I had to play with the game upside down... basically anything that wasn't "kill n of x".
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (Switch) OR4M:
I was so happy to have this remaster, finally, but I had wanted to do this OR4M thing for a long time. This made a good inaugural playthrough. I am the first person to document finishing it on this version, which is pretty cool, because there are substantial, arbitrary buffs to enemies in chapter 4. The final battles were very exciting.
Final Fantasy (NES) Monster Party:
This is maybe my longest-teased playthrough, with concepts of it going back to 2018. I had mentioned it in my Year In Review posts for 2023 and 2024! I'm very glad to have finally done it; it was fun and it looked awesome. However, in the last week it's come up that some of the mechanics at the very end of the game may have been a bit broken so there's a non-zero chance it might need to be revisited.
Trials of Mana (SNES) Prescribed Party 2025:
This was another RevenantKioku event for a game I'd played several times and never beaten. It's weird because I strongly disliked the beginning of the game, but the end is pretty great.

I also played a bit more of Gloomhaven (Steam) with Classic Jobs and still didn't finish it. As I said last year, I'll probably just come back to it every so often.

System-Specific Year in Reviews from 2025

This year I was surprised to get a year-in-review from Twitch, and I was able to find one from Steam that wasn't expressly sent to me. Nintendo didn't have one for me! Perhaps it's because of times being precedented or not.
Twitch gave me this:

There's nothing surprising about that, really, it's the games I streamed for these playthroughs. The funny part, I guess, is that I got it at the very start of December. Perhaps that's why Chrono Trigger is in there despite me skipping the Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge this year: the Twitch year is a little unaligned from the calendar year.

Steam gave me this.

It's a bit more reliable than prior years, although my kids still use my account a lot. I think my fourth most-played game was Planet Coaster 2, which I've never actually played. My fifth most-played game was Beltmatic, which is accurate! My kids have been watching a lot of Real Civil Engineer and thus they're really into simulations and automation games lately, and Beltmatic grabbed my attention for a while.

VVVVVV being number 1 is funny: that's caused mostly by my youngest son, CannonTrys, who has become somewhat of a VVVVVV speedrunner, playing the game for hundreds of hours this year across all of Switch, 3DS, Steam, mobile and his Miyoo Mini. I do enjoy the game but I'm not especially good at it myself.

On Switch, I spent the most time with Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, and Mario Kart World. We got a Switch 2 fairly close to launch, actually, but I've barely played anything exclusive to the new hardware.

Other Happenings in 2025

I am on the fence about relating my personal and professional identity so I don't usually discuss my work much, although for people who watch my videos and read between the lines my work is probably pretty obvious! I'm not hinting at something one might want to hide like contract killing or drug dealing; it's more a matter of keeping my professional image relatively pristine. Sometimes I care about this and sometimes not.

However, this year has been really hard on the system(s) I work in, and that's resulted in a generally hard year professionally. Furthermore, as I've discussed during Trials of Mana and FF1 Monster Party, in mid-November a colleague of mine passed away - which is a terrible thing just on its own, but it also meant I inherited their workload. Where I had been really excited about work opportunities in my 2024 Year in Review, this year has just been dry and a lot of things I wanted to happen didn't work out. Ubiquitous generative AI has also been more of a negative than a positive on my day-to-day, unfortunately.

There was also some terrible family medical news earlier this year that resulted in my parents selling their home in the Spring - it was all dramatic. I guess that's why it doesn't seem like I did much here for a few months.

In short: all the personal news was kind of bad news this year! But really my wife and kids are happy and healthy. I live in a nice place and my job is stable - for now. I am grateful, and still mostly privilege-aware.

Plans for 2026

I finally got a few things off the list! Valkyrie Profile and FF1 Monster Party had been a long time coming. Lufia 1 and Breath of Fire 1 still sort of interest me so I'll try to get at least one of those done this year. It would also be fun to play FF1 through... well, as far as I can in the series - with blue mages only. But that'll take some scripts or hacks and that's time-consuming. Oh, and there's another FF1 project I'd really want to do that'll require scripts and a helper program, but I don't want to overcommit so I'll just leave that for now!

I got the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters for both Steam and Switch in 2024 and I've still only played 1, 3 and 5, so I'd like to walk through 2, 4 and 6 under some kind of variant condition. One of my kids gave me an idea for FF6, so I'm just figuring out FF2 and FF4. Perhaps there will be FJF events for those!

For some reason, my kids all got into Pokemon games recently. We got chatting about it and now we're finding ways to transfer Pokemon all the way from generation III games forward into Scarlet/Violet. As I facilitate this, hatching eggs and giving them stupid names and stuff, I find myself actually quaintly remembering all the past adventures I had with them. It sounds like some campy nonsense out of the anime but I'm serious! I may have just remembered this week that I kind of love Pokemon games. I might need to spend some more time on that in the coming year. It probably won't be for the sake of variant gameplay.

In Conclusion...

Honestly, this year was terrible! Sometimes, in the worst times I have, personally and professionally, every so often I just think, "I need to play a game". Often when this happens I remain time-constrained so a game with low time-investment fits really well, like my beloved Vampire Survivors or Peglin. However, I really found Xenoblade Chronicles X and Trials of Mana chilled me out during the worst times. It really feels like a disgusting vice when I say it like that, but I have to think it's better for me than huffing paint or whatever I could be doing. So... hurray for videogames!

As is tradition for these posts, I'll just say I'm happy to talk to anyone who likes things I share to connect via BlueSky, Discord or GameFAQs (which cannot decide if it's dead or not).

I hope we'll all have a great time in 2026.

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Final Fantasy Monster Party Part IV

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 04:11:12 GMT

After not playing since November 29th, I finally came back to my Final Fantasy Monster Party playthrough on December 23rd. I happened to be joined by kids.

While I had saved outside of the Temple of Fiends and even attempted it once, I really thought I'd benefit from finding a FIGHTER to join me.

FIGHTERs (or Dark Fighters in modern releases) are potentially really useful in that they've got abundant healing spells, but very rare outside of the last area itself. I figured the game's final area would take me a whole lot of tries and I thought it would be worth my time to recruit FIGHTER before heading in.

There was talk on the GameFAQs Final Fantasy board at some point before September 2018 about what monsters could defeat CHAOS, which gameenjoyer credited to robertebalmer, theorizing that PHANTOM, FIGHTER, EVILMAN and MudGOL could beat CHAOS by having MudGOL use FAST on PHANTOM and itself. While I wasn't sure how deep the analysis had gone, this gave some credit to the idea that a FIGHTER might be borderline necessary for the end of the game.

A problem here is that while FIGHTER is a fairly common enemy early in the game's final area, the only other place a FIGHTER can appear is in the Sky Castle as a very, very rare encounter. While I can meet them in the game's final area, I have no means to leave - so in terms of using enemies I've actually survived, it felt like I'd really benefit from finding them in the Sky Castle. While I understand the mechanics of this game's encounter tables, I couldn't find an easy-to-digest list of encounters by area... but I know that the rarest encounters tended to be relatively late in encounter table cycles. So my son and I fought IMPs for a bit!

My son had picked SPHINX to join the team. SPHINX is a... pretty average mid-tier monster with no standout abilities. We replaced SPHINX pretty quickly when we actually went to the Mirage Tower, settling on CHIMERA after a while.

I took a picture of what the computer terminals say in this version of the game because of a recent riddle thread, which can be contrasted with my screenshot from the Side Quest Challenge:

It took quite a while but 1 hour and 23 minutes in, after like 5 full party deaths of encounter cycles, we met some FIGHTERS.

Like MAGE and ASTOS, FIGHTERs are fairly good stat-wise and they have nice spells, but relatively low HP totals.

Naturally, this happened while I was leaving:

I actually predicted this might happen as a known quirk of the encounter tables. This time I ran away for a change - though I might've attempted it if a SORCERER was with me! We escaped successfully.

Then I healed up, purchased more items, and did attempts at the Temple of Fiends Revisited. This was attempt 2 overall: The first team I used on this day was SENTRY, FIGHTER, Blue D and CHIMERA, although we beat PHANTOM and I decided to replace SENTRY with PHANTOM. PHANTOM also managed to land a ZAP! on CHIMERA, so we were pretty quickly down to three monsters on this attempt.

As had been discussed on the NES FF1 board, PHANTOM is an offensive and defensive beast.

FIGHTER died to some Frost Ds shortly after, so I was left with PHANTOM and Blue D. They defeated LICH and KARY without much issue. A battle with six WATERs right before KRAKEN was pretty hard on them. For KRAKEN, I swapped Blue D to MudGOL so that he could use FAST on PHANTOM for massive physical damage. Under these conditions, they took out KRAKEN in three turns! Unfortunately, softened up by some WzVAMPs and with no heal potions left, PHANTOM was killed by TIAMAT on turn 1 and we lost.

For the next couple of attempts, I left PHANTOM active and had a few little team composition changes. For the first few floors, encountering Frost Ds is common enough that I didn't want to bring Gas Ds even though I appreciate their ability to clear randoms... so after a while, I was using PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and JIMERA.

When things went wrong in the early going, I just let the team lose. I figured if I got four monsters to LICH, it was a live run. I reasoned that with the elemental floors it was easier to gear up my team for specific types of encounters.

Attempt 3 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by Frost Ds a few floors in, so I let the team lose in the battle after that.
Attempt 4 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by an 8 BADMAN sneak attack very early on. I let them clobber the rest of the team, too.
Attempt 5 was the first one where I started with PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and Red D, dropping JIMERA. FIGHTER died on the first floor so I just let the team die there.

Attempt 6 also had a nasty 9 BADMAN sneak attack almost right away, but I let it ride. After that and 2 Gas Ds, I was down to 75 potions before PHANTOM. I had only used a few more by the earth floor, and the easier battles here allowed a bit of opportunity for FIGHTER to use HEL3.

For LICH, I replaced FIGHTER with Gas D specifically so he could endure a NUKE. This ended up being an excellent call since Gas D (in the second character slot where FIGHTER was) took 390 damage from LICH's turn 1 NUKE! This has us down to 35 heal potions, and we put FIGHTER back in.

We were in fine condition for KARY and won that handily.

At some point, PHANTOM's paralyzing attack worked on KARY, which made things a little bit safer.
On the water floor, it made sense to switch Red D to something else. I chose SENTRY, intending to use MudGOL but only right when I got to KRAKEN. Thus, for a very short time the team was PHANTOM, SENTRY, Blue D and FIGHTER, in that order, and then we swapped to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and MudGOL.

KRAKEN said "no" on turn 1.

We had such good plans! Oh well. The rest of the plan went well and we won handily, especially with PHANTOM stunning KRAKEN at the end.

I swapped the party around after the battle to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, and MudGOL and brought these three to TIAMAT.

Again, PHANTOM's stuntouch came in clutch and we delivered a decisive victory against TIAMAT!
After the battle, my son said, "This is our first time getting to CHAOS!" and I said, "Well, don't speak too soon."
Then we encountered four WORMs in that tiny area between TIAMAT and CHAOS' floor.

While we managed this fairly tough fight and FIGHTER's healing abilities contributed, they did kill MudGOL.

Well, we got two monsters to CHAOS. My son and I debated keeping a savestate in case we wanted to easily try again or not, and with hesitation I decided to do one.

So, this CHAOS fight! We went in with PHANTOM and FIGHTER. This meant we did not have MudGOL's FAST... but we did have FIGHTER's WALL spell, which is pretty great. Even better, PHANTOM stunned CHAOS on turn 1.

CHAOS would eventually recover from stun, but PHANTOM re-inflicted it... more than once. This allowed FIGHTER time for bits of extra healing, plus buffs like INV2 and FOG2.

With this, on our first try and with just two monsters, we defeated CHAOS with a party of monsters!

Victory!

Now for some screwing around.
Chat had actually been fairly active this day, especially with bits of participation from RetroHomebrew. My son was enjoying the engagement and wasn't feeling done yet, so we did a bit of bonus activity. There was a bit of dabbling with a party of 4 IMPs... then we took the 4 ToFR versions of the fiends through ToFR to beat CHAOS.

This... wasn't very fair at all.

Next, RetroHomebrew happened to put into the chat, "", followed by "🤖" when my son suggested they might be a bot. So my son decided it would be nice to pick this team! The second monster was WarMECH, the third was WIZARD, and the robot emoji at the end clearly represented SENTRY. We had trouble figuring out which monster was most like Bomberman and decided on a FIRE elemental. We took this RetroHomebrew squad to the desert to try to fight a T REX.

Surprisingly, it didn't actually take very long!

Even more surprisingly, my son mis-clicked and ran away from T REX instead of defeating it. But, thanks to that encounter table quirk I discussed earlier when WarMECH appeared, it only took a few more battles to encounter a second T REX.

We won and added T REX to the list! RetroHomebrew stated they were honoured by this.

The list of defeated/available monsters was getting pretty close to done now, actually, so my son wanted to do the "catch 'em all" goal. We hunted down a GrPEDE, a BigEYE, and a FrGATOR. While doing this, we tried out the four SORCERER party that FatRatKnight had requested.

In the course of this I explained to my son that Mindflayers instant kill by removing an opponent's brain, and thus it made sense that they couldn't instantly kill a HYDRA. While this isn't mechanically a factor in Final Fantasy, somehow it felt like the SORCERER deathtouch was not particularly effective against HYDRAs.

In the end, we have encountered and defeated at least one of every monster other than OOZE (Earth Cave) and IronGOL. Maybe we will still want to do that; I don't know.

To wrap up, my son took one other unusual team on a quick jaunt through the ToFR.

Amusingly, though my son who joined me for most of this session has played Final Fantasy (mostly Dawn of Souls) and gotten all the way to CHAOS, he lost to CHAOS and hadn't saved in ages (because he was playing on an emulation handheld), so this was his first time beating the game! Super legitimate.

While we are done the playthrough the way it was spec'd out and intended, there may be more play and experimentation to do related to this so it's possible there will be a further update. My son started discussing a Nuzlocke playthrough using this Monster Party script and, honestly, that sounds like it could be a great fit. We'll see if anything else comes from the community related to this!

If this is where the playthrough ends - which would be logical, since the original goal is complete - then I'll say the script is still a bit of a mess but this is certainly one of the more interesting playthroughs I've done, and the actual coding and setup required is probably the most intricate I've done; the only thing that could come close in complexity is the script that forces job stats in Final Fantasy II.

There was a bit of break in the timing but life got really complicated for me in November, thus the partial shift to the Trials of Mana event. Playing FF1 with a party of monsters had problems but it was super fun and very novel, which I like. I am extremely grateful to FatRatKnight for their contributions in terms of coding, ideation and general enthusiasm.

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Trials of Mana Prescribed Party 2025 Part IV

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:53:52 GMT

This update is based on gameplay from December 14th and 15th. It might be worth a note that the event this is associated with ended on December 15th!

As of the previous update, I had just upgraded to my final classes. In fairly short order, I went to the Crystal Desert.

I didn't do any levelling up after getting the new classes, so although it had some positive statistical impacts (well, arguably given this game's strange damage mechanics) I hadn't learned any of the new abilities. This was odd to me because I finally did some grinding in the last session, doing nearly everything through the seventh Benevodon by level 33 and getting to 38 immediately after. Either the damage mechanics were working against me bigtime, or there was a gigantic difficulty spike here. I think it may have been both.

Anyway, we got to the dark Mana Stone. I had to use a few Cups of Wishes along the way.

I had said in the previous post something like: if you haven't played this game and there's any chance you're going to, stop reading, because the Benevodon battles are actually pretty interesting setpieces and you oughtn't spoil it for yourself.
Well, this final Benevodon... surprised me!
I have played this game before through maybe the first few Benevodons, and people used to talk about this game so I kind of knew how Dangaard, Fiegmund and some of the others worked in vague terms... but I've never actually played this part. If I'd ever seen the dark Benevodon before, I certainly forgot it. It is very creepy and cool.

I had also complained about this game a lot at the beginning, but honestly it gets way better as it goes. I wish it didn't take this long to get good, but this part was exciting!

Zable Fahr.

This boss was creepy! I did my usual scheme of applying some random saber and then buffing with items. This made the fight feel pretty manageable. It didn't take me too long at all to get the face on the right down.

Oh, awesome we won!

WHAT THE HELL.
This third creepy face joins in, revives the other two, and has really nasty attacks including Annihilate / Death Spell! This fight really picks up in ferocity. I had said I used some Cups of Wishes on the way here. I literally ran out!

This boss worked exactly the way it was designed, I guess. It was generally really creepy but also delivered on the surprise factor. A little after the third head showed up, I decided I should focus my attacks on it. I won, but barely.

After exiting the fight, I didn't realize there was a path to continue so I got back on Flammie only to realize I was supposed to stay here. Ah well, I needed to buy some items and stuff anyway. You can bet I bought 9 Cups of Wishes! Really, I should've gotten more.

Coming back through the Crystal Desert, I finally gained level 39 with everyone. This meant we started gaining abilities, though the first few new abilities aren't very interesting. Angela gets single-target, mid-level spells, Duran gains the ability to multi-target his existing sabers, and Charlotte got this:

It would be a bit longer before we'd gain anything really exciting.

There was a lot going on for me personally and professionally during the 1-month span of this event. I'll elaborate on that later, actually, but I had been really busy this month. From here on we're talking about gameplay from the afternoon of December 15th, the day the event ended, and I didn't want to have another event like FF7 with Jobs 2023 where I missed the deadline by a few days. This was me desperately rushing to finish the last few areas of a game I've never beaten. Grinding did not feel like an option!

Before we got very deep into Dragon's Maw, Duran and Angela earned level 40.

The enemies here were really tough. This included nasty combos of special moves, especially from the Dark Knights, and the Peeper enemies - while among the fastest to defeat - had a really annoying instant death attack. The instant death effects in this game drive me bananas, especially since there's no means to guard against it (again, the equipment system is bland).

We met the Darkshine Knight here.

With our item buffs we were pretty well set, we just had to keep our hit points nearly full at all times to survive his sword techniques.


While I wish I had it just slightly earlier, this battle resulted in Charlotte gaining level 40 and the Dark Curse spell.

This is going to change the way we do business!

In Dragon's Maw, I actually started using Dark Curse in random battles from time-to-time when I could pick out a single strong enemy, like a Black Knight.

I eventually wandered into a battle with Harcypete. Here we were able to make excellent use of multi-target Stone Saber as well as Dark Curse, which made the fight extremely easy. Angela's buffed Earthquake spell was doing over 800 damage.

We won! The nice thing about this as an easy boss battle is that, while there don't seem to be any golden mana statues around, we get a full heal from the bosses.
The bad news is that a full heal doesn't matter when you can be hit by a random idiot's Quakebringer attack for 600 damage.

After this, I had to find Harcypete again. I realized that the bosses here were gating certain passageways with statues but the wayfinding was awful. It actually took me some time to get back to Harcypete. Before the next boss, I was already down to 5 Cups of Wishes - although every so often I'd find another in a chest.

While this was generally really annoying, as pretty much every death felt cheap, it did result in my learning a bit of strategy. I had realized that when you cleared a screen of enemies, all party members get up and status effects are cleared. I learned that I could strategically leave rooms to revive characters.

We were level 42 before the next boss.

This is nice because the next boss is our digging friend Jewel Eater, and I've now got a Thunderbolt spell and a multi-target Thunder Saber.

This cute guy is not much of a fighter. I don't remember my first battle with Jewel Eater being this way, but he wasn't damaging me at all while I pounded the crap out of him on the left side of the screen. I think the only time I actually took damage was when he used his dash move to cross the screen. This may have been the easiest boss yet!

If only the normal, respawning enemies were this easy.

Around this point, we gained level 43. This meant a few exciting things: Angela gained Ancient Curse, which is kind of like a Meteor spell from a Final Fantasy game, and Duran gained Moon Saber which is almost as badass as it was in Secret of Mana.

I was saying earlier, during the Harcypete part, that this area is confusing. There were times when it was a little frustrating and given that I had only a couple of hours to beat the game, I ended up looking up a map of this place. It's the only part of the game where I checked a map! Then I felt really silly, because although the beginning is confusing and interconnected, the last few segments of Dragon's Maw are very linear.

Okay, the next boss was Fullmetal Hugger. We used Dark Curse and Moon Saber and it was very easy. Moon Saber makes the game "flow" better, actually, because you're not constantly interrupting the regular gameplay to get to the healing things in the menu and then watching them animate.


Next, we found the Crimson Wizard and he sicced a bunch of easy enemies on us.

At first I misunderstood what was happening and treated this like a boss fight, and buffed and debuffed everything. But after the second wave I didn't bother and things went nice and quickly.

In the next part, suddenly we're in a fancy-looking castle, I guess. We have to fight waves and waves of normal enemies. While these enemies are still tough, and there is still some cheapness like Peepers instantly killing us, we're level 44 now and generally a bit stronger.

I came to realize here that what the Peepers are actually doing is akin to the terrible Roulette ability in Final Fantasy games: if they happen to select an enemy with their spotlights instead, that enemy dies.

This seems like it adds a sort of fairness... except that it's still really unfair when there are no other enemies around! This is the only time I saw it affect an enemy.

I may still have been underlevelled, really, since my team is level 44 and the enemies are level 48. However, we still had a couple of Cups of Wishes and we were able to keep Moon Saber active for this entire gauntlet, which helped a lot.

Next, we finally met the Dragon Lord, who I have been led to understand is a jerk but he really didn't make that much of an impression.

Then we fought the Crimson Wizard. There's something funny with the way spellcasting times work in this game - they either continue through menus or other spellcasting animations so when different characters act there's often a sort of chain-casting effect. This meant that as I buffed and debuffed, I was hit with waves of spells! Thankfully, perhaps because of the Dark Curse in play, we stayed pretty healthy.

It took ages to get the buffs in place because of all of the spell animations, but once we did the fight was sort of hilarious. Moon Saber did most of the healing, so we all just surrounded him in a corner and bullied him to death.

Every so often he'd knock us back, but the only really disruptive thing he did was Annihilate Angela once. It was not a bad fight.

I had accumulated 5 Gear Seeds.

I wanted to use these, but as I implied yesterday while you can sort of affect the RNG for seeds in this game it takes a full save and reset, then a step to alter the RNG like a battle. I tried it a bit but honestly, it took a long time and the results I got ended up being worse than the original. In the end, I got terrible equipment from these. Of the couple that I could use, they were helmets and accessories.

I only had about three hours to finish the event in time... so no, I wasn't going to optimize my equipment.


Onward to the Sanctuary of Mana.

This area is full of Shadow Zeros and shapeshifting enemies. In general, it was enormously easier than Dragon's Maw...

...until an enemy shapeshifted into Duran and used Hollow Blade against us.

In general though it was legitimately way easier. We got to the Dragon Lord without much issue.

This boss sort of has phases but it doesn't feel too much like one of those marathon, multi-form endbosses. We applied Moon Saber, all of our buffs via items, and we used Dark Curse on the Dragon Lord (which we re-applied when he buffed).

I mostly guessed how his changing colours worked correctly, allowing Angela to damage him a lot with an opposing element. When he turned Cyan I dropped some meteors on him instead.

Although I think this screenshot was from him dropping meteor on me. It wasn't amazingly powerful.
It was a fairly long fight but never truly dangerous. We won!


I finished at about 9:30pm on the final day of the event! I quickly posted my victory image.

I think to end this - although I could arguably keep going and beat the Black Rabite or something - I need to debrief on this game, this event, and this experience as different things.

The Game: I complained a lot at the beginning but the whole thing really does get better as the game proceeds. I think a lot of the issues I raised are valid: some of the music in this game is fantastic, while other songs are pretty awful. The equipment system is about as bland as they come, aggravated by the worst RPG menu that has ever existed. Even the combat has more downs than ups, with the constant stopping for spells and specials that didn't exist in other games in the series to date. It's got its strengths though: the backgrounds and environments are consistently gorgeous and the Benevodon battles are fairly unique and interesting.

Do I want to play this game again? Mmmmaybe. I would've said "no" earlier on but the late game is much more fun.

The Event: Playing this game with a prescribed party could be sort of interesting, but I think I happened to get a fairly normal and balanced party. In fact, I think any party with Angela and Charlotte is probably going to feel nearly the same. I may have gotten unlucky on this front. That said, this party has no real deficits other than the lack of debuffs until Charlotte learns Dark Curse. I think it could be pretty fun to get a highly unorthodox party: it's possible to get one with no healing and no debuffs! I got off easy. This doesn't make much of a variant.
In the end, the time pressure I had forcing me through endgame for the first time at a pretty low level and rapid pace may have been what made this interesting.

The Experience: On a personal note, as I briefly mentioned during that one really bad play session for Final Fantasy Monster Party, a colleague of mine recently passed away. He actually died on November 15th, when this challenge began, and I signed up before I knew about him because I had some planned travel and expected to play this game on a long train ride. After the news dropped, I ended up taking over a large chunk of this colleague's work where our final deadline was December 16th! This is why the Monster Party playthrough has been a little on the slow side. It was quite a stretch to finish this game when my hours were largely spoken for.

I happened to finish what I needed to based on my own workload and that of my colleague in time to spend most of the afternoon of December 15th blowing through the game's last few areas. Not to make my retro gaming blog all emotional, but there was a sudden drop when my work commitments were done, and I'd just beaten this legendary game for the first time, and finally all of the time pressure was off. While I had taken moments to process what happened with my colleague, there was a bit of... realization when I finished these things.

This event, as run by RevenantKioku, was benefitting Trans Lifeline. It was only when I finished that I realized there was a connection here: My colleague was always really good to transgendered people we had mutually worked with, including a time when they were sort of the first to identify someone who was newly understanding that side of themselves. After I posted my #victory, I thought a donation was a way I could honor him, which I hadn't really done yet. So there we are.

This game was... okay. This variant was... a little lame. But am I glad I did it? Yes.

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Trials of Mana Prescribed Party 2025 Part III

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:28:00 GMT

The "Let's Play Trials of Secret of Mana 2: Seiken Densetsu 3 Edition" event (benefitting Trans Lifelife) actually ends like... nowish. I guess you'll have to read on to figure out whether I managed to complete it or not! But there's only so much I can discuss today. This update is based on gameplay between December 4th and December 13th.

First: I ended the last update with "...or so I thought!". Well, this is because when I used an SD card to get the images for the last update, apparently my emulator hadn't properly saved so when I next picked up the game it took me back to my last actual sram... which was most of the way through Beuca Isle, at level 15. I had been at level 19! This takes me back to before the class change!

Argh. Okay. I had to replay roughly an hour of the game to get back to the Fiery Gorge. This is frustrating, though it could've been worse.

Once we were finally back to the entrance to the Fiery Gorge, we had to fight Bil&Ben a second time. This battle was pretty annoying when they act as a pair and do rapid-fire Shadow Menaces. That results in rather desperate situations like this one:

But some of our new, class-changed abilities helped out, like an undodgeable full-screen sword attack and being able to heal all party members at once.

Despite that one close call, we won on that attempt.

Fiery Gorge was fine. It's on the short side. Hawkeye was here. That monster lady is named Belladonna in this one. No further boss for now, and we got Salamando.

Next we went to the forest where it's always night, and the town of Mintas. This had some equipment upgrades including a reminder that moogles are also in Mana games.

We ran into the Deathjester and fought Ludgar.

I enjoy the moves where someone rips the screen into pieces and tried to get a screen capture of that but you can't really tell. Ludgar is one of those fights where his special attacks are nasty spike damage, but with some multi-target healing and maybe some Cups of Wishes it's not bad. That might be most bosses in this game, actually.

We won and met Luna.

Next we went to, uh, Wampbwoom Woods.

Here I gained level 22, such that Duran now had four elemental sabers. Every so often I use them in random battles, but they are mostly for bosses, at least for now. Angela and Charlotte don't really gain a whole lot of new abilities.

Somehow, the elder of the village understands Charlotte and tells us Lumina can open a path in the woods.

This led us to the boss, Grapplavine. This is a pretty cool-looking boss. With a few buff items and a Flame Saber in play, it wasn't the least bit hard - although he did knock Duran out right as we won.

Now with Dryad, we were able to find the portal to the Sanctuary of Mana.

The structure of this game having three main villainous "parties" where one of the villain teams sort of "wins" based on your own character choice is pretty neat. Anyway, we need a dragon to get into the portal so we're going back to the boring mountain.

This part of the game actually turns up the cool factor a lot. I had complained about music in the first post, but there's a lot of bangers here. The Flammie music and the Sanctuary of Mana music are both excellent.

Well, two of the villainous teams drop out of the race, we get a Flammie drum, and then I went to Altena because the Crimson Wizard kidnapped our fairy friends.

Fighting wizards is annoying. Also, wayfinding in Altena Castle is annoying! They need to do the thing where they paint the walls different colours of something. It took a while but we got through.

Now we're onto the Benevodons! Since I was already in Altena, I went looking around for the one that lives nearby. The Labyrinth of Ice was actually quite close.

I didn't expect myself to be at the boss so soon, but I was! It was the Benevodon of water, Fiegmund.

Most of these Benevodon fights, if you're uninitiated, are based around some kind of setpiece gimmick - like a Mission: Impossible film or something. This one's pretty cool. He can appear underneath the ice. Angela was still able to target Fiegmund under the ice with spells.

He can still use some nasty attacks from under there.

But we won without issue.

I didn't have a particular order in mind or any other plan, and went to the Chartmoon Tower. It's a very bland dungeon but the fights were okay. We didn't get lost often. This dungeon could've been a lot more interesting if this game had treasure or something.

The end is cool though! Like I said, the Benevodon fights are setpieces, and this is a great one. Honestly, if you're a person that hasn't played Trials of Mana and you think you might, you should probably stop reading since some of these get kind of cool and it's better without spoilers. I'll elaborate on this later, actually, but for now you're warned.

Dolan is awesome.

I don't remember too much about the fight other than I was already buffing with saber spells and items before he appeared. He had one really nasty attack but - perhaps because of the aforementioned buffing - it was an easily-managed fight.


Next I ended up in a forest. I don't even remember what it's called, but it's near the glowing spot near the Wampbwoom Woods. As a dungeon, it was fast and simple.

The Benevodon of tree (?) is Mispolm. He is also cool. I enjoy the music in this fight.

I kept using Dark Force on it because it seemed to be Angela's strongest move. Somehow, despite it seeming to try to reflect spells, it never actually happened. I only later learned from a guide written by MeepleLard that this might be considered a bug?

Perhaps because of this, Mispolm was very easy. Its tendril/vine attack, Barrage Sting, is really cool looking but it wasn't very threatening.


The next time I played I tried to get to Shimmering Ruins. For some reason I thought it would be one of those places that I could just walk to, similar to what I did going from Altena to Labyrinth of Ice, so I started wandering around the earliest areas in the game near Wendel. That was a waste of time! It turns out you just fly into these ruins.

I judiciously used magic to accelerate some battles - or, if not to accelerate them, then to knock the enemies down a bit. I mean, since every spell freezes the action (unlike the prior game) magic makes the combat crawl. Furthermore, Angela's dark class only has very weak abilities to target all enemies.

When I saw Parpotos appearing, spawning from other Potos, I thought I'd spend a little intentional time here because I knew these were the key to early ??? Seeds. I was at level 30 so this wasn't a crazy thing to spend time on now. I wandered back and forth and, having given Charlotte a few extra points of luck, it really didn't take long to get 3 of these.


We got to Lightgazer with little issue. We did the usual protocol of a saber, then some item buffs, and this made much of the battle pretty manageable despite some strong attacks.

This was probably always going to be an easier one for us since Angela has a pretty potent Dark Force spell. It was sometimes funny watching her aim at Lightgazer right at it was appearing or disappearing.

The next one we went to was Dangaard, the Benevodon of... wind?

Again, a very setpiece-y battle, though I think Fiegmund and Dolan are cooler. You fight on Flammie, and Dangaard actually looks kind of small in comparison.

One thing that I found quite annoying about this is that the fight switches back and forth between a head-on view and a side view, and when this happened the battle sort of... restarts? I am fairly sure it clears all of our buffs. It certainly cleared out sabers. This made me use fewer buffs after the first phase transition.
Anyway, we won.

The next one is Xan Bie, which is a quick one, attached in an extra part of the Fiery Gorge that was blocked by flames earlier. We had beaten 5 Benevodons and we were level 32. I was starting to notice that I was often a little behind some of the enemies in the dungeons in terms of levels, but besides when I stopped for ??? Seeds in the Shimmering Ruins it never seemed like I ought to be grinding.

Xan Bie went down very quickly. I don't even know if I really understand this fight. At the end I was like attacking a furnace or something?


Once again, instead of just trying to land on the glowing dot I looked around for the Benevodon of earth for a while, even heading into the dwarf village. Whoops. Eventually I got to the right place and enjoyed some equipment upgrades.

I had been having trouble consistently affording the latest and greatest gear. I may have even skipped a tier of it. When money was tight, I prioritized armor, then weapons in priority order Duran -> Charlotte -> Angela. This is based on both their actual power and the likelihood that they need to attack.

Skipping gear and my somewhat lower levels started to show here. This area, Daria Gem Valley, was legitimately challenging. I came in at level 33 and there were regularly level 40 enemies! I used a good few Cups of Wishes.

Given that I had gotten my ??? Seeds and feeling underlevelled, I decided to push it here and put in some grinding time. Probably at least an extra half hour of it, truth be told! I got to level 37 before facing the boss here.

Land Umber is the Benevodon here. It is kind of creepier than I remember? It was sort of interesting. But using our canned sabers and buff items strat, this was quite an easy battle, especially since he does so much single-targeted attacking.

Well now, this is awkward. We're level 37. It turns out all of the enemies in Daria Gem Valley... and, uh, all of the recent areas are basically gone when you beat them.
I tried going to the Sanctuary of Mana to grind the last bit, but there are no enemies there anymore, either. I considered just going to a pre-Benevodon area like the Frostbite Fields, but the enemies there give like 50 experience each.

I'd really like to gain level 38 to do the class change, but it would take over 200 regular enemies from prior areas to level up! Forget that!

Okay, steps to take. I'll cash in those ??? Seeds. I got a Battler Tag - yup, that's the right one... and an Ash Bottle - yes, that's good... and an Omen Book. Huh. Perfect seed results. I was saving to get prepared for save scumming but it wasn't necessary at all!

(I guess that's good, as I would later learn with Gear Seeds that save scumming in this game is quite cumbersome. I never ended up actually having any success with it.)

I decided to fight in the Jungle of Visions. This area is tiny and you basically need to keep leaving it to respawn enemies, but at least they're all worth a few hundred experience. I got level 38 and went back to the Sanctuary.

Duran changed from gladiator to edelfrei.

Charlotte changed from enchantress to necromancer.

Angela changed from mysticist to magus. I must not've taken a picture of her selecting an Omen Book.

We bought the weapon upgrades in Pedda. I think we're ready for that last Benevodon.

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Trials of Mana Prescribed Party 2025 Part II

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 03:14:08 GMT

This entry is based on little bits of gameplay from between November 25th and December 2nd. I had previously gotten to Laurent.

I did a bit of wandering back and forth, as I said I might, before fighting the big wall/door thing, whose name is Zehnoa.

I remembered this fight being annoying in prior (partial) playthroughs but it was actually quite manageable.

Bil&Ben were harder, actually, because when they did two Shadow Menace attacks in quick combination they could sometimes knock someone out without me having any time to react. Overall though, it was fine. I don't really see how any of these battles could be truly tough as long as Charlotte's healing a lot.

In my last write-up, I wrote a lot of complaints about this game. One I didn't touch on before was how amazingly bad the menus are. They are slow, unresponsive, ugly, and barely functional. And on many menus there's no cue for how to even interact with that menu. You press A and then random directions until something happens. It's literally one of the worst game menus I've ever used.

And it's strange because this had been done so well within the ring menus in the prior Mana game!

We shopped in Palo, and I'm glad I did because it was a long time until we could shop again. We got on the Ghost Ship. I had no real issues here, although I chose to skip battles after losing Duran for a while, which I guess was smart.

This meant that, for the boss, a large proportion of my damage was going to be from spells. It was slow, but it was fine.

At one point he did beat Angela, but that provided an opportunity for her to be revived with full MP to accelerate the fight a little.

We then went to the exploding island. We were able to shop again in Tomato Town.

Maybe because I've been pumping Duran's strength so much, his defense has pretty consistently been worse than that of Charlotte and Angela. I don't know the mechanics of this game too well, and I don't really notice whether 8 points of defense is a lot or not... but it sure feels nice to get new gear, despite the terrible menuing and blandness of the equipment.

Eventually I found the cave at the end of the island. The rapidly growing birds here were pretty annoying to fight.

The enemies in the cave were much more manageable. I actually spent a bit of extra time here, since I knew I'd be finding a Mana Stone soon.

We met Malocchio and then got our directive from the King of Valsena.

Translations like "Beuca" and "Vuscav" were new to me and unexpected, but I don't care that much.
We got the Ferry Flute and now we were able to summon Vuscav. Very fun.

We went to the Altena area and I didn't even realize I was doing a "dungeon". I saved at the gold statue and didn't know I was already basically at the boss! Here were our stats before running into the Darkshine Knight.

I was glad to have gotten level 17 when and where I did! The fight against three Machine Golems was a simple one.

And look! It took us right to level 18!

We met Undine and also got our first class changes. It feels like this variant playthrough - such as it is - is actually getting underway.
Duran became a gladiator.

Charlotte became an enchantress.

Angela became a mysticist.

Cool!
This felt good. The stat boosts are pretty huge and it's also nice for Duran to have Spin Slash.

I made an awful lot of use of that!
We went on to the desert. We had a minor equipment upgrade in the oasis town of Diin and saved up there.

...or so I thought!

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Trials of Mana Prescribed Party 2025 Part I

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 04:06:18 GMT

I have a weird history and relationship with this game. I guess it's called Trials of Mana now, although that's the same name as its recent remake, other people might have reason to call it Seiken Densetsu 3 or Secret of Mana 2 (which it's never actually been called).

For me, I've mostly known it as SD3, because it was like a holy grail of unlocalized games among my peers in mid-90s IRC channels. There were tales abound about how to get imports, how to remove the plastic region blocking pins from your US Super NES, and maybe learn some basic Japanese. All I could really know about it for a long time was its music, passed around as MIDI and then MP3s. Perhaps partly because of the mystique I thought it would be a wonderous game to play.

Over the years, I've tried playing it by various means like emulation (which wasn't very good for a long time), and then the Collection of Mana which I got on the cheap for my Switch a few years ago. For some reason every time I play, I go in with the best of intentions, I make like a whole spreadsheet planning out how I'll pick my characters and classes to meet needs, maybe over a few playthroughs, I get to the first class change... and then I totally lose interest and don't pick it up for a few years.

I really thought this game was something special for decades, but I've come to realize that it just isn't my cup of tea. The combat is very, very mashy, especially at the beginning. The music has nice instrumentation but a lot of the composition has jarring timing and even out-of-key elements; about half of it is good. The graphics are very nice with excellent sprite work and some of the finest, most unique tile-based environments you'll see, though the graphics are often flickery in practice. The main game flow is "go to eight spots twice". There's no treasure to be found so the exploration is really just a matter of not getting lost, and the equipment system is incredibly bland. It has good and bad but really doesn't keep my attention; perhaps that's a me problem.

Anyway... I've started playthroughs on at least three prior occasions and never beaten the game. Luckily, RevenantKioku started another event which is a nice way to force me to do things. Given that I finished what I wanted to do in Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles and my Final Fantasy Monster Party playthrough requires playing at my computer with some designated time, I wanted something I could do on-the-portable... so this seemed like a nice choice.

I guess this event is called "Let's Play Trials of Secret of Mana 2: Seiken Densetsu 3 Edition".

I happened to draw characters as Duran in his Dark-Light class, Angela in her Dark-Dark class, and Charlotte in her Dawk-Wight class. *shrug*

I started play on a train trip on November 18th, and played a bit more on November 23rd and 24th.

It feels a bit stupid discussing this for posting screenshots because the early game is so, so samey. There's a lot of running back and forth and talking to a specific random villager. But the team is different, at least. I chose Angela as my main.

I chose Duran as my second.

And Charlotte as my third. I did this because I recall really specifically getting advice about this in like 1996 that if Charlotte is chosen as the third character, she joins quite a bit earlier, before the first boss fight.

We fought that boss. It was great. I pressed A a lot of times.

Then we walked a bit more and found some Kilroys or Machine Golems. I really cornered one and pounded it with attacks and magic and that made this easy.

Then we walked back and forth between the only two destinations we can get to and got to the third boss, a mole fella called Jewel Eater. I actually used all of my casters' MP and had to just throw items by the end. Angela died at one point, but a Cup of Wishes restores MP in this game so that was sort of a happy accident.

Going to Valsena just to get told to find Sylphid is dumb. It is a long and unfun trip with holes.

We went up to Laurent (which I guess is how this is translated now, sure). I got turned around a bit on the mountain, which is probably expected, and that means we gained a level or two which is nice. A few levels make a pretty critical difference in this game, I think. Gnome's spell was great here.

Next, fetch quest. Leave the mountain, go to a town, find a tiny guy, go back to the mountain. Sure.

Then we need to get Sylphid. This part was okay, although I remembered it being tough and sort of wished it was easier to get into fights in this area. It didn't end up mattering because I moved a mind-boosting item and an attack-boosting item into our inventory. I gave the mind-boosting thing to Angela and the attack-boosting thing to Duran, and the next boss was surprisingly easy. We didn't even run out of MP.

Next, we went back to the flowery field and entered Laurent. I believe the next boss is a door-looking thing? And it sort of sucked so I'm actually tempted to wander back and forth killing things a bit.

This game is funny. It is really very pretty and it has nice elements. I'm deciding as I play whether I like it or not.

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Final Fantasy Monster Party Part III

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 03:10:14 GMT

This update is about gameplay from November 21st and November 29th. On the 21st, I did a short stream that was doomed by a combination of tiredness, life happening, significant Twitch stream issues, and cat interference. It's linked but not embedded because it was short and unfun; all I actually accomplished was getting the SLAB from the Sea Shrine.

I had been using Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER, and that was pretty good, but I suspected Red D wouldn't be great in the Sea Shrine, so I changed my team to MAGE, EYE, Frost D, and Sorcerer.

Frost D is far weaker than his red brethren, but where Blaze is resisted by most enemies here, Blizzard is extra effective against the annoying, frequent WATER elementals.

We got the Slab with no real issue. We skipped most of the other treasure.

I made it out and saved in Onrac with the Slab and decided to try my luck going down to Kraken. Every so often, something mildly exciting would happen between stream crashes, like EYE successfully petrifying an enemy, or XXXX being delightfully useful again.

However, around the same time as the fifth or sixth stream crash, we got wrecked by LOBSTERs of all things and I took that as a sign that I should stop after quite a short play session.

Then today, I picked back up again, saying I wanted to build some momentum. While it wasn't all rosy, we got some things done!

First I went to Melmond to talk to Dr. Unne about my Slab. We learned a language and then I chose to sell the armor I had collected, including a Ribbon. That felt... filthy.

We wandered down to Lefein. These enemies were much simpler to fight than the Sea Shrine, or maybe it was just nice to be using Red D again.

We got our Chime. The plan, specifically, was to beeline the Blue D! Nothing was going to make the Sea Shrine - and many random encounters in general - more bearable than being able to use Thunder whenever we want.

This went fine!

Blue Ds are bulky! Their absorb rating is actually lower than several monsters I've been using, but with my minor buffs from levels and catch-em-all-ing its max HP is well over 500.

I thought... why stop there? There are some really neat monsters in the Flying Fortress.

What I said at the time, and it's true, was that I didn't see why we couldn't attempt TIAMAT now. I mean, we could go back to the Sea Shrine but it wasn't like we were going to unlock some amazing monster there that would make everything suddenly more viable, right?

Using Blue D was a lot of fun. We fought a lot of AIR. Their evasiveness was noticeable with single-hit monsters, but irrelevant when we were using so much dragon breath.

Oh yah then this.

My dragon squad could barely pierce his defense. Their breath weapons would hit but weren't doing great damage. However, there was always the chance that SORCERER could land a deathtouch. I was actually sort of surprised at how long we lasted.

In the end, believe it or not, the SORCERER deathtouch is actually what happened.

Now we were faced with a real dilemma. I would like to keep on record that I beat some of these enemies, including WarMECH - not that my monster list strictly reverts to my prior save or anything, it just seems wrong to claim ownership of a monster that I didn't beat in a finished trip. So I pondered whether I was more likely to walk back through the Sky Castle and Mirage Tower nearly out of Heal Potions with two monsters... or just beat TIAMAT.

Considering the well-known BANE/sword cheese for TIAMAT, I thought I'd take a shot at it.

Maybe I could just... petrify her? I brought EYE and a MEDUSA for the job.

It was a nice idea, I think... but it didn't work.

I tried again to rightly claim Blue D. On my next trip, I encountered some SLIME. I recalled having a great time with SCUM back in the Earth Cave and thought SLIME might give me a good shot at TIAMAT.

I don't think I was that misguided, but this didn't work either.

We got TIAMAT down by about half.

Okay, let's do something else and re-think the strategy. We know TIAMAT is weak to poison, right? Maybe it would be neat to get a Gas D. As a bonus, the Gas D fills a bit of a gap in the Sea Shrine where Red D isn't very effective. So I grinded through the encounter table in the Waterfall for a long time until we finally met the very rare Gas D.

For some reason I brought a NAGA for this. I thought its LIT2 spell might be nice in the Sea Shrine, but besides that and its high HP it doesn't have much to offer; it may have been quite a bad choice. Oh well, we're done with that now.

Unfortunately, the sprite used by Blue D and Gas D has got to be the single ugliest party-sized sprite of the bunch. As well, I was surprised that Gas D's special showed up as "POISON d" but eventually I realized that's to distinguish it from a JIMERA's Poison ability, which inflicts status instead. That ability's name isn't extracted from the game data, it's in FatRatKnight's script verbatim.

The Gas D was excellent. For most of the Sea Shrine, I used Blue D, MAGE, Gas D, and SORCERER.

Again, I pretty much skipped all of the treasures, since they're completely pointless. I got two easy-to-grab ones totaling about 600 G, so that's super great.

When it came to KRAKEN, I thought about actual strategy and realized MAGE wouldn't be doing much. I decided to pick a bulky physical person and I planned to FAST them using MudGOL, so the team was going to be ANKYLO, Blue D, Gas D, and MudGOL.

We got quite well-healed up; it was going to be perfect.
Then turn 1 happened.

Classic KRAKEN. He immediately one-shot MudGOL. Oh well, we could power through all this.

With three orbs lit and a bit of momentum (as I said we wanted at the beginning), I figured we should get back to TIAMAT. I kept the team, actually! ANKYLO makes a pretty great leader with his great offense and defense. Along the way we beat/recruited EVILMAN and SENTRY.

SENTRY is one of a handful of monsters who are better than ANKYLO in many ways statistically. Similar defenses, equal absorb, and higher attack. Both of them also have enough luck to run from battles reliably! At the suggestion of my chat, I emphasized defense against TIAMAT. I lost a monster along the way, so I brought SENTRY, ANKYLO and Gas D - whose Poison should do double damage to TIAMAT.

With that, we had all four orbs lit!

While it would be nice to wander toward endgame, I might need to consider my strategy. I don't think I need to hunt specific enemies, unless I need a T Rex or an early FIGHTER or something. At my chat's suggestion, I was starting to take a single attempt at the game's final area... but then the stream cut twice really quickly. I decided to abandon ship.

Next time we play, we'll try to get this done... and depending how that goes, we might have some other experiments to do.

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part VI

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 04:29:54 GMT

I finished my OR4M playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics today, on November 10th. It had been a while since my previous play session partly because of the monster playthrough of FF1 I've been doing, but the breaks I took during this are nothing compared to my previous FFT variant play.

We had done a large part of chapter 4 already. Our first destination was Eagrose to face Dycedarg. We decided to fight Dycedarg instead of Dycedarg's elder brother.

You can see that I brought my assassination squad here. The Gobbledygook wasn't going to be viable as we'd never be able to get up to the top level of the map in time, but I figured Root Beer Float the Revenant and Ampelos the Behemoth King would carry value against both Dycedarg and Adrammelech.

This battle was tough and it took several attempts. For some I used a regular Behemoth instead of a King Behemoth to make use of Gigaflare, but ultimately Twister was more useful. I had some early runs with a Behemoth but they didn't work out well, especially when Adrammelech got to 100% petrifying each monster.

Dycedarg would tend to quickly throw out a Hallowed Bolt and wreck my starting crew. Sometimes I'd try to keep going even if a utility monster like my Cockatrice or Vampire Cat died, but there was an occasion where I reset the fight because Root Beer Float the Revenant turned into crystal. That usually signaled the beginning of the end.

In brief, one I refocused on emphasizing proportionate damage and exclusively targeting Dycedarg, things went better.

The battle at Mullonde Cathedral I mostly find interesting for having geomancers. They are pretty nasty on the offense, actually, and it felt like the enemies had rather high HP in general here. The GameFAQs board seems to be full of whispers that among this version's vague balance changes, there's a pretty substantial HP buff given to enemies through chapter 4. Luckily, that doesn't matter when I turn half of my opponents into statues.

I talked all boastfully but really, this wasn't easy. It was at least three attempts before I got through without Ramza crystalizing because of a geomancer's attack dealing ~200 damage. Even that prior screencap was from a losing attempt.

The interior battle is a funny one. To win, all you have to do is get any one of Loffrey, Cletienne or Folmarv into critical status. The problem is that HP buff I was talking about. Cletienne is still the weakest, but he had 673 HP. Proportionate damage is the probable solution but that also requires surviving a serious onslaught from Folmarv and Loffrey.

With some luck and two successful Drain Touches from Root Beer Float, we were able to beat what felt like a tough one on the first try.

Ramza was named greatest contributor here, which is a total farce.

In the tomb area under Mullonde, we had our fight with Zombaag. Honestly, the voice acting for this scene made it legitimately creepy and sad. I've never found these scenes particularly impactful, so... good job, remake.

I think I was completely brilliant in this fight. The key move was bringing my Mindflayer, actually, who was able to occupy the demons and also cancel some of their spellcasting. It got knocked out, of course, but it certainly bought me some time. Since elements didn't really matter, Reis came along to bring some bulk and higher-powered breath attacks - although, really, someone with Drain Touch or something like that may have made sense, too.

After this, I did some propositions/errands (which also results in a few high-levelled monsters). My wandering also triggered the Construct 8 scenes although that doesn't actually matter for my variant play. We needed to go through Goug since Loffrey had smashed my last Mythril Gun.

I also did a few battles at Balias Swale hoping to recruit a basic Hydra, but there was no such luck and I didn't want to grind or risk high levels. This did enable me to get a couple new high-levelled monsters, like a nice new Gobbledygook (named Silkbottom Mars) at level 42 and a new Mindflayer (Kleobis) at level 43.

Now we were ready enough (?) for the final sequence. In the Orbonne Vaults level 4, we had what I realized was literally the final "defeat all enemies" battle in the game, against an archer, three knights and two monks. The monks had well over 600 HP, quite a bit more than my dragons and behemoths. Our first few attempts went quite poorly (and I posted about it), but then I decided to experiment with letting the enemies come to me and that went a bit better.

Petrification and Gigaflare were the big wins for us. I made an intentional sacrifice play by letting :)( yngiht drib the Cockatrice turn into a crystal after a while, and then I was surprised that my Red Chocobo got poached by the enemy archer. I decided not to reset for this since it was the last non-boss battle in the game anyway, which I think was a good call.

Next was the battle with Loffrey. This battle went amazingly well. A few things worked in my favour here: I had Ampelos the King Behemoth and Root Beer Float the Revenant for proportionate damage, I had generally low faith all around to make the casters mostly irrelevant, and I brought my Mindflayer to further disrupt the casters. I even brought my Greater Malboro, resulting in Loffrey's goons having a wide variety of ailments through the fight.

It was very manageable. The eventual victory came down to Ramza shooting Loffrey at a great distance just once with his Mythril Gun.

Now we're into the Necrohol of Mullonde, which... surely means something.
The first battle here is against Cletienne. It was tough. This one might've taken me ten tries, although some of these attempts were short. Each time, Cletienne would start by aiming Flare at my still-mid-faith Greater Malboro, so I'd counter by using Enlighten on it to make the damage far worse. I tried to hang back to avoid the onslaught from ninjas (the other enemies weren't very scary) but I needed to work on offense. The ninjas and samurais all have over 700 HP in this version, so defeating them by direct damage is pretty pointless. Even Choco Meteor only does ~100 damage depending on compatibility, so I needed to rethink this.

One again, the answer was: assassinate! I brought Root Beer Float and Ampelos and made every effort to get them safely toward Cletienne while the rest of the team was essentially a distraction. An early, strong attempt and my eventual win both involved Root Beer Float literally teleporting all the way across the battlefield (bad odds!) and Drain Touching Cletienne on turn 1.

Beyond that, this required some luck. This included a completely bizarre string of epic dodges on Ramza's part that I managed to capture:

Even though this shows Ampelos missing Cletienne, this was the eventual winning attempt. With Ramza surviving and Root Beer Float camping next to Cletienne, we were able to get another proportionate attack off to win. Er, to almost win. A time mage had thrown Cletienne a Potion, so Ramza also needed to shoot him once at the end, just like with Loffrey.

You might notice that Ramza's HP was a little low in that last battle. That's actually because Loffrey had broken his armor - a Black Costume - and I had forgotten to replace it. Before the battle with Barich, I replaced it with a White Robe to mitigate the elemental damage from guns and tiamats. I also ditched the Featherweave Cloak since evasion wasn't going to matter much for the rest of the game.

Barich seemed like it was likely to be a tough one, but I had the power of iteration! I knew I just needed a bit of favourable positioning and some luck to recruit the terrible flying dragons and this would come together.

I also tried to be strategic without a Tiamat, but I can tell you that it didn't work out. This still probably took fewer attempts than Vaults 4 and Cletienne. I tried really hard to stay to the side that Barich starts on to bring the winged dragons over and keep my party formation tight. Root Beer Float landed a Drain Touch and then spent most of the battle knocked out.

On some attempts, I was greatly helped out by unusual luck on the Tri-Flames and Tri-Thunder.

Eventually, I ended up with some very favourable positioning where the Greater Hydra and then the Tiamat were directly across the short gap from Ramza and he was able to use Entice on them. (Conveniently, the Tiamat was exactly level 50, if that mattered.) I actually got both - but not the normal Hydra - and it was the Tiamat who eventually killed Barich with a Tri-Flame.

This takes us to the graveyard of airships! I wasn't too afraid of these battles because of my assassination team. I went all in on it, actually: the team was Ramza, Boco (for healing), Root Beer Float the Revenant, Ampelos the King Behemoth, and Silkbottom Mars the Gobbledygook. Ramza and Boco were the support, and the other three could all do some heavy lifting.

Honestly, these final three battles all went so easily and quickly that it's sort of hard to elaborate on, but it's really fun to see the big damage numbers. Every member of the team got a chance to shine, that's for sure.

The Ultima fight seemed like it could've been tough because of the Ultima Demons, but they mostly threw out bad spells and targetted Alma (who had reraise status). I also used Ramza's turn to Mimic Darlavon and put a pair of them to sleep successfully twice.

The second form of Ultima had us on the ropes a bit. It must've used Grand Cross five times, but between Ramza's Remedy and Alma's Dispelna (?) we held together. At one point a Divine Ultima was aimed at Alma and I had Ramza walk over to her and Enlighten her. It lowered her magic effectiveness for future spells, but saved her in the short term, and MP was getting low at that point anyway.

I also found Ultima's final form very fast. It was hard to keep up the heals, but we managed.

We won! This was a pretty good challenge. Someone in my GameFAQs thread about this playthrough said this seemed boring but variant play is always about novel solutions to problems and the monsters really allow for that. Though I'll admit - I probably had at least 50 failed battles through this whole thing. Though I know my decisions mattered, there were points where it felt like it was more of a test of patience in saving and reloading than it was in actual strategic skill.

I had seen wpot's threads and guide about OR4M for literal years, so it was really fun to finally do it, and it's amusing that it loosely coincides with the timing of my FF1 with monsters playthrough, too. This was also a nice way to experience the new version of FFT with a bit of a... guiding framework.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles feels like an excellent version of this game. As for its impact on OR4M, these seemingly very inflated enemy HP values definitely change the way you need to approach the end of the game. It basically becomes all about petrification and the three monster types with proportionate damage. Perhaps that does make it less interesting.

It's still a good way to play this game, I think.

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Final Fantasy Monster Party Part II

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:44:55 GMT

I played my second session of "Final Fantasy with a party of monsters" on November 7th. Friday nights work well for me right now, I guess!

Although I had recently added WIZARD to the team, I had access to TROLL from way earlier and I thought I should consider that. TROLL is a little bit better than WIZARD for most purposes.

One thing that isn't very fun right now is that ASTOS and VAMPIRE, as bosses, have incredibly low luck stats. They are essentially completely unable to run away from battles. This sort of sucks when I fight large groups of undead that also resist FrWOLF's Frost attack; they take ages to defeat and sometimes carry some risk.

Getting the Rod from Sarda was no issue. There aren't a lot of interesting enemies in the Earth Cave or that area, but I replaced TROLL with an EARTH because of the high single-hit damage. I was also happy to eventually find WzOGREs. I fought SPHINXes, too.

Despite this, I didn't replace the team. Unfortunately, FrWOLF got killed at some point. His 0 absorb rating is really working against him. I gave some serious thought to spot-replacing FrWOLF with the WzOGRE, but that is irrelevant since I don't have any means to revive a monster in the middle of a dungeon anyway. And I never will!
I decided to push through anyway. On to LICH!

My plan was to go through ASTOS' spell list, even though RUB and SLO2 were likely to be pretty useless. I wanted to be able to FAST one of my good attackers - namely VAMPIRE - and then throw out FIR2. I may have overthought this as we won rather easily.

I went and got the CANOE. I also had to restock my heal potions, as we have been going through an awful lot of those lately. Although it was nice to have some choices, I thought the VOLCANO would have the easiest enemies and I knew I'd benefit from a Red D. I replaced the fun-to-use defensive liability that is FrWOLF with WzOGRE.
I didn't have to fight very much thanks to strategic lava walking. I met an R.HYDRA pretty early and used that for a bit.

The R.HYDRA's Cremate attack isn't particularly good. We also got CEREBUS but it's even more underwhelming.
Eventually, we found our way to the bottom floor where we had guaranteed options to fight AGAMA, Red D and KARY. AGAMA was first. I was pretty impressed with AGAMA's stats and actually switched it in for the Red D.

Red D had been a goal for a while - not just because of its general strength, but because Blaze is a particularly strong damaging enemy skill. I quickly put Red D on the team, opting to kick WzOGRE out. Thus, it was ASTOS, Red D, AGAMA and VAMPIRE who faced KARY.

I knew that KARY is weak to status element, so while I had ASTOS start his spell cycle with RUB and didn't expect it to work (which it didn't), I thought VAMPIRE's Dazzle might work. And it did. With that, the fight sort of took care of itself.

It seems we won without taking any damage.

Having this team was great as we encountered large groups of enemies, especially undead.

This built my confidence in advance of heading to the Ice Cave. Sometimes these strong multi-target spells were still the best option even against enemies who resist it, which I guess I also did from time to time when FrWOLF was on the team.

It's funny having these fire monsters on my team in the Ice Cave. It feels like it should be dangerous, but I think the only enemies here that use ice attacks are the Frost D and FrWOLF. The team was mostly able to mow down the encounters here, especially the undead groups. I was worried about things like SORCERERs' deathtouches but none happened to affect me. SORCERERs have reasonable defenses, actually, plus Trance, so I added one to my team.

The Frost D I met wasn't too scary. I checked the stats and Frost D was actually sort of unimpressive compared to the current team, so I didn't swap it in.

MAGEs can be a source of worry, and indeed their elemental attacks are nasty! They have pretty good defenses against physical attacks but they don't handle magic attacks particularly well, so we were able to nearly wipe them with Blaze. I don't know if it was luck or the high, monstertastic magic defense but RUB didn't affect us.

It seemed appropriate for a MAGE to replace ASTOS. Although ASTOS' FAST spell is nice, it takes a few turns to get to, and MAGEs have LIT3 on their second turn! Their defenses are comparable too.

Red D, MAGE, AGAMA and SORCERER vs. EYE was pretty quick and easy.

Within a fairly short span of time, my team had changed a lot. I now had Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER. This group is pretty amazing. It felt borderline cheap being able to throw out XXXX in the first turn of any fight. LIT3 was also absolutely worth the one-turn wait.

I didn't take more screenshots as I played, but this part of the game felt funny. Normally, getting the airship is very exciting, because you can access high-level magic and Gaia's excellent equipment. For me, strangely, it doesn't do that much! I considered going to Castle of Ordeals, but the only monsters there that I'm likely to actually use are SORCERER and MudGOL, one of which I have and one of which is also in the Waterfall.

So... I just went to Waterfall! I got the Cube. That was fine; it would've been nice to run into a Gas D, but that didn't work out. Instead, I met a whole herd of NITEMAREs. NITEMAREs are normally pretty unremarkable enemies but it actually tended to take my team a good few turns to defeat them.

Next I'll most likely do the entire Sea Shrine. I wonder if I ought to change the team? Red D may not be particularly effective in there.

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Final Fantasy Monster Party Part I

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 21:58:59 GMT

On Halloween, I started the "Playing Final Fantasy with a party of monsters" playthrough that I've been occasionally working toward since 2018. I actually streamed a little bit of it previously, and the VOD from that is here, but that day's goal was sort of a mix of adding some last-minute features, playtesting and bugfixing, so when I played on Halloween last night I started anew.

I can't overstate the contribution toward this from FatRatKnight, who I had also been very indirectly acquainted with from some tasvideos threads in 2008-2010 (when I was fairly active there). I ran with this idea originally posted by GameFAQs user KingRamz, actually, but when I said I wanted the characters to behave as monsters it was FatRatKnight who wrote the original (slightly bugged) script to give monsters a "magic list" and "special list" and override stats when characters are initialized to make almost the whole thing possible. I added bits, including making the monsters actually appear in combat, but from my perspective I did the easy part.

Although the script could be implemented in many ways, the specific way I'm using it for this playthrough is starting with the four weakest monsters (as suggested by gameenjoyer) and, for each new monster I defeat, I get to add that monster to the list of monsters that are available to my team. It's sort of a little bit Pokemon-like. I can switch any time outside of combat (although if doing so would lower that character's HP, that happens). I made a little C# Windows app that runs while I play where I maintain the list of monsters I meet and also select which ones make up the party.

Here's the full video of the first session:

The starting party is WOLF, IMP, BONE, PIRATE.

These monsters being so much better on the offense than IMPs might make you think that the start of the game would be easy, but they aren't likely to endure more than one fight. This makes sense when you compare their statistics to the actual starting light warriors, right? Even my best character's hit points are lower than a level 1 black mage, and they aren't wearing armor.

Most of our starting gold went to reviving and inn trips in the early going. The game is set up such that we gain +1 max HP for each monster we've recruited and +2 max HP per level - beyond that, levels have no effect on anything. The reason I added this feature was so that levelling would do something and possibly even provide an option to overcome what might otherwise be a roadblock, and to incentivize encountering a variety of enemies. This is why you see, for example, that my IMP has 12 max HP - because we started with four monsters.

Since levelling doesn't contribute anything other than a very minor HP boost, grinding is not an appealing option. What I really needed to make progress was a monster that was stronger than a WOLF, IMP, BONE and PIRATE, but could reasonably be defeated by my team. There are only a few options near the beginning that can work, and the first we encountered was a MADPONY.

This MADPONY, of course, utterly manhandled the team... but my single surviving fragile little monster guy turned into a MADPONY and was able to make it back to Coneria to revive the team and heal up.

Next, the team of MADPONY, IMP, WOLF and BONE met some GrIMPs. I have never considered GrIMPs really the least bit challenging, but here they are as a serious asset for us.

IMPs are pretty much the lowest-damage enemies in the game, but my starting IMP stayed on the team because they have a little bit of an absorb rating. GrIMPs are a little bit better on the offense, but with 16 base HP and 6 absorb! Oddly, this was my best defensive guy for a while. With the GrIMPs we did a little trek into the Temple of Fiends and recruited a SPIDER, who is distantly better than a BONE.

Most of the local enemies aren't very threatening to this team anymore, although only GrIMP has any appreciable defense. It was time to approach Garland! On the way, though, we met a GHOUL! I beat the GHOUL and decided it was worth going back for another heal in Coneria.

FatRatKnight had just been asking me whether status-touch effects are working or not, since I hadn't done that in my recent tests. It turns out that the answer is yes. GHOUL was amazing to have on the team! He's got reasonable HP, 3 hits for 8 damage, and even a bit of absorb. As well, his stun effect was paying off amazingly well. Maybe too well? It certainly made GARLAND easy.

I decided that I wouldn't actually use GARLAND on my team in this playthrough, just because it seems icky for plot reasons. I'm also not going to use the four fiends themselves. GARLAND won't be missed too badly; although he's got a lot of HP at the beginning, nothing else is particularly good.

Like in my test play, I ran into an IGUANA just beyond the bridge. IGUANAs have always been very unremarkable to me playing this game normally, but here they're quite a strong party member for me.

IGUANA, GHOUL, MADPONY and SPIDER then engaged Bikke's crew. Obviously, this was no issue.

With access to the Aldi Sea, we could meet and join up with some other strong enemies, like R.SAHAG and SHARK.

With a stronger crew including IGUANA, OGRE, SHARK and GHOUL, I thought it might be kind of neat to go to the Penninsula of Power (PoP) / Penninsula NE of Pravoka (PNEoP). My intent wasn't to ruin the gameplay (funny to say when we're so distantly beyond what was dev-intended) but I did want to use interesting enemies and the FrWOLF's Frost ability was interesting to me.

Right away, I pitched a tent for a local save. It took a while to encounter FrWOLF. The first enemy I encountered was one of the strongest PNEoP enemies: TYRO. I was sure we were doomed, but GHOUL actually managed to stun-lock him while the other monsters dealt over 400 damage. We actually beat TYRO!

I said that using a TYRO now would utterly undermine the gameplay. It would be kind of fun to steamroll a large part of the game, but I wanted to keep trying and appreciating different monsters. Thus, I checked off TYRO as available but didn't add it to the team.

I used another tent, and ran into a ZomBULL and two TROLLS. I thought we were doomed, but I actually had GHOUL paralyze the TROLLS at the start of the fight before joining the utter dogpile on the ZomBULL and, although they certainly had us on the ropes, we won!

Amazing. Again, I decided not to use these monsters yet. I tried a couple more battles here, but the groups of GIANTs kept crushing me and when I did eventually encounter FrWOLF there were eight of them. That didn't work out well for me. Three super-powered late-game enemies was plenty for now.

I'm sure we're more than ready for the Marsh Cave. On the way, I added lots of other monsters to my team such as ARACHNID, KYZOKU, CREEP, and OddEYE, but my team stayed pretty well the same. In the Marsh Cave, though, I encountered a SCUM. SCUM are interesting: in regular gameplay, you hate them because they have high defense and inflict poison a lot. The poison part doesn't matter, but the idea of leading the team with an incredibly tanky slime boi seemed like a good one. It took a while to beat the SCUM but with GHOUL stunning it there was no risk anyway.

GARGOYLEs were also an interesting addition with their high damage potential.

I did not defeat the WIZARDs on my first try. I thought I might, but besides SCUM tanking their hits like a champ they could often wreck the rest of the team in an attack or two. I thought GHOUL's stunning attacks would carry us through, but they could not.

My second attempt was closer, ending with me running out the turns with turbo on while SCUM and the last WIZARD exchanged pitiful damage against each other. It's actually kind of amazing that if the poison status worked on enemies, it would actually have made a useful difference here.

For the third attempt, I considered my options and realized that R.BONE is actually pretty great. I swapped R.BONE into the team and we won.

There was no good reason to return to Elfland, so we went up to face ASTOS. SCUM wouldn't do well against ASTOS' magic, so the team was now IGUANA, R.BONE, GARGOYLE and GHOUL.

GHOUL kept ASTOS pinned down for the majority of the fight. He did throw out a RUB eventually, many turns into the fight, but it wasn't effective. His SLO2 did effect GHOUL that did actually matter somewhat since it reduced his three stun-touches to one, but ASTOS didn't last long after that.

Of course, now that we've beaten ASTOS, we can become him!

This is nice, because it gives us access to our first... well, our first anything-but-a-regular-attack ignoring a super-weak OddEYE's GAZE. Part of FatRatKnight's work is that a monster's next spell and/or special in their cycles appears in battle.

It also means if I'm willing to go a few turns using relatively bad spells like RUB and SLO2 that I can make use of FAST and some spells that affect more than one enemy.

This all works amazingly well. The spell animations work, the in-battle statistical effects are clearly functional, and it's fun. RUB isn't even a good spell, statistically, but I had a ton of fun erasing snakes and sharks and other things.

Well, now it's time to do the fetch quest. Along the way I picked up several treasures even though most of them are entirely useless. GHOUL actually died facing GARGOYLEs in the Temple of Fiends. GHOUL is... really starting to feel a bit old. It also feels like with monsters' high magic defense values that the stun-touch is coming in clutch a lot less often.

I did a bit of running around, like meeting a GIANT in the Earth Cave and then stumbling into a GEIST nearby. GEIST is a minor upgrade for GHOUL. I needed to heal after the first Earth Cave trip and since Melmond has no clinic I went all the way back to Coneria. While I was there, I figured I may as well take another little crack at the PNEoP. It honestly still didn't go well for my team overall, but it was amusing seeing GIANTs affected by so many status effects because of ASTOS.

We encountered a group of WYVERNs after a couple of attempts, and we were actually able to beat them.

After successful fights, I'd use a tent to save. In less-successful attempts, I'd let the team die to reload my save or even just reset because that was so much faster and easier than returning to town to revive the downed monsters. When I'd reset my script would sometimes go a little crazy.

Anyway... it didn't take too long to encounter some FrWOLF friends. This time, I met just four of them! This seemed pretty attainable.

Having FrWOLF on my team was so cool! Literally, lol.

My first crack at the Earth Cave wasn't super great. A pack of stunning undead decimated the team.

An EARTH then took out GIANT before the VAMPIRE.

By moving ASTOS into the front, I encountered one of the funny issues with monsters. Despite having all of these interrupts and GUI features and whatnot, this is still the original Final Fantasy for NES without bugfixes. Consequently, the running behaviour is still super bugged. Characters at the top of the party can run reliably if they have luck over 15, and their odds are obviously low for low luck values.

In FF1, monsters don’t have luck. For a few stats, like intelligence and agility, I was able to get actual, official stat values from later releases of the game, but not for luck. The way I determined monster luck values is based on the fact that luck mostly affects escape chances and low morale monsters are more likely to escape. Thus, the value is derived from a formula, which I believe is this: Luck = max((204-morale)/2, surprise chance)
A consequence of this is that bosses and a lot of late game monsters have very, very low luck statistics. Astos can't escape.

I really wanted to escape a battle with a bunch of COCTRICEs since just ASTOS was alive, but there was no way. He had to just blow them all away. Amazingly, he didn't get petrified, but perhaps that's just because of monsters having such high magic resistance.

ASTOS was actually able to defeat the VAMPIRE single-handedly...

...but since he can't escape from battles he got destroyed in a battle with four GrOGREs on the way out.

Our next attempt went much better. The whole team made it to the VAMPIRE and I said aloud that the VAMPIRE could one-shot FrWOLF or GEIST. Isn't that exactly what happened on turn 1?

The rest of the team won without issue, and we managed to make it out.

On the way out, VAMPIRE finally replaced GEIST/GHOUL. As well, I realized that I had been foolishly ignoring some other rather potent monsters like WIZARD! VAMPIRE and WIZARD have excellent attacks.

The team is like... a bunch of early-game bosses and their canine companion.

When we left, we only had 12 heal potions remaining. We went back into the Aldi region to restock, and I decided to be done for now. Next time, we'll finish off the Earth Cave for sure.

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part V

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:43:15 GMT

I worked through a large portion of chapter 4 on October 25th and 27th, 2025. As noted in the prior entry, I'd already done a little bit of chapter 4 recruitment including getting a Behemoth, a King Behemoth, and a certain Holy Dragon. The Behemoth had also proven itself quite useful so far.

The first stop was Daguerra Pass.

Oddly, I don't seem to have taken a single capture of this battle. It took three tries, I think? Often Ramza would go down a bit early when I positioned him aggressively to put some of the heavier units to sleep - it was a nice idea with a big potential payoff, but if anyone stayed awake it would generally mean Ramza was done for. The team I brought was Ramza, Boco, Erato the Vampire Cat, Thamyris the Sekhret, and Typhon the Blue Dragon. The low faith of this core group made the threat of the enemy black mage negligible.

Once again, I was bemoaning not having certain monsters: it was clear that a Cockatrice might've been an asset for this fight.
I did a couple of battles at Balias Swale, where I'm not even 100% sure what I was looking for - maybe a Hydra - when I encountered a Cockatrice and made friends with it.

The walking around trying to get tier 3 monsters and dropping the lowest-levelled ones again resulted in an abundance of monsters. This, again, resulted in an abundance of my kid renaming them for me. Rhakios the Cockatrice, unfortunately, became 1)(: ygniht drib.

My favourite was that an empty space is considered a valid name, and the Guildmaster thought it was fantastic.

Bervenia Free City was a rough one on my first attempt. I thought it would be easy with a Cockatrice, a Red Chocobo and a Behemoth all being able to use unblockable attacks at any height, but it turns out when you've got a squad like Melly's it isn't so simple. Still, this only took two attempts: the thing I had to remember was to not rush so that I could draw Meliadoul toward my team.

Finnath Creek is one of the rare mandatory battles that's still very randomized. I didn't get any kind of optimized setup.

This was a battle with three Red Chocobos, a Black Chocobo, a Chocobo, and a Pig. Three reds is not ideal. I could've reset to the map and gotten something better, but I chose not to. This is interesting because even though this took me about four tries, it was always this same setup, as if the random seed were preserved. I decided I really wanted to beat this exactly the way the game presented it.

The first step on the better attempts was Ramza using Entice on a Red Chocobo.

The Mindflayer always got knocked out on turn 1 and Ramza mostly went down shortly after, so then it was a matter of getting my powerful monster squad to beat these enemies before the rest of the team bit the dust. Given we had a new Red Chocobo buddy, this wasn't actually that bad. Thamyris mostly dealt with the Chocobo and Pig entirely by themself.

So can a Blue Dragon, a Red Chocobo, and a Behemoth take down two Red Chocobos and a Black Chocobo? The best answer I've got is... eventually.

The battle outside of the church in Zeltennia was kind of hilarious. I knew it would be easy, but with Ignore Height on Vampire Cats and Red Chocobos and with a flying unit, not to mention Gigaflare hitting arbitrary heights, I knew we'd be able to hit Zalmour very quickly and very hard.

Beddha Sandwaste was surprisingly easy. I will admit I got lucky with an early Mimic Darlavon. I've also kept my faith very low on my core units, so Barich himself wasn't very threatening at all. My Chocobo cleared most of our poison on turn 1, for what that's worth.

With Barich being mostly irrelevant and half of the other enemies indisposed, I actually completely ignored Barich and gradually took out every single other enemy.

For a change, this one was a very easy first try.

At Fort Besselat, I chose the South Wall. I did this without being very informed, I just vaguely remembered doing it before. (It turns out, I notice now, wpot strongly recommended doing the North Wall, and also said that Beddha Sandwaste is exceptionally tough.) Again, the multi-battle map was really cool here.

This south wall went really well. Between Erato the Vampire Cat and 1)(: ygniht drib the Cockatrice (sigh), we had a pretty big collection of statues.

Perhaps I got lucky. Everyone survived! Thrived, even!

The sluice battle did take more than one try. Ramza getting hit with charged shots by the archers was pretty nasty, resulting in some attempts that I cut pretty short. Gigaflare was very important here, as was Erato's Blaster. Again, the low faith on several of my units helped a lot: when someone trained a Firaga on Typhon, he would just stand next to them so the caster would incinerate themselves.

A thing that surprised me was that the battle ended when I defeated the last enemy instead of waiting for me to press the switches with Ramza.

Chapter 4 is very long. Really, the end of Fort Besselat is as much of an act break as there was between chapter 1 and 2 and between chapter 2 and 3. A lot of things happen.

Now we're proceeding to Limberry. First on that route was Germinas Peak. I didn't bother taking a break for any special preparation, although I generally bought the new items when the outfitter got an upgrade.
Germinas Peak was fine. I was worried about the archers getting up high and sniping us, but I actually had a few of my more acrophiliac units hog the high ground and somehow that worked out well for me. The petrification helped.

Next up was Poeskas Lake. This was fine. I decided to have Ramza Entice one of the Revenants and I'm sure that helped a lot.

It was actually a somewhat close call - 1)(: ygniht drib was going to die on their next turn, but I prioritized ending the battle, and it worked.

Okay, Limberry. I was dreading this, actually. The first attempt did not go well. Similar to Meliadoul, I figured the right approach might be drawing the enemies toward the team. I brought a Revenant as well, which ended up being useful. With a Drain Touch, two Choco Meteors, and a Feather Bomb we were able to get one assassin down.

What was really weird here is that Ramza was listed as top contributor. He literally got affected by Shadow Stitch before his first turn and never actually took a single action. It is unclear how "Greatest Contribution" is determined but somethin' fishy's going on.

I knew that to beat Elmdore, I was likely to need some proportionate damage and an offensive focus. Gigaflare, Feather Bomb and Choco Meteor are all delightfully unblockable. I thought Twister could be an asset, so I brought my King Behemoth. This took two tries, though, since my first formation was stupid, and when I set up the second time I accidentally picked my Behemoth instead of the King Behemoth but I decided to give it a whirl anyway. This turned out to be a good thing.

Sadly, this 549 damage Bloodfeast didn't work. Would've been cool though! And the odds weren't even that bad.

With the team on the ropes, I had options with Ramza. The best path was going to be reviving whichever monster could most effectively end the fight. I figured if I revived my Behemoth, who was coming up in the turn order, he'd get one more shot of Gigaflare.

This happened to be exactly enough firepower to take out Elmdore.

This battle is normally one of those ones that I know has a very different... curve to it. I sort of dread it, trying to find an approach that'll work. Needing just two tries where one failed immediately due to stupid formation choice is pretty awesome, really.

I didn't think the undercroft battle would be harder - and it wasn't - but it also took two attempts. My team included a King Behemoth, a Revenant, and a Gobbledygook here. I was really, really leaning into abuse of proportional damage as the key strategy.

With Nightmare affecting Ramza and generally putting him to sleep, it wasn't easy to use Twister or Bloodfeast. Meliadoul and Boco held off the enemies who were behind us while anyone else who could manage to stay awake was on the offensive.
Of course, what this really means is that Root Beer Float the Revenant was running the show. Root Beer Float did over 2000 damage in this fight!

Look at Zalera's funny little animated mouth at the end!
We won, and Root Beer Float was appropriately named the MVP.

Once again, beating Zalera is a pretty substantial act break. We're over halfway done chapter 4, and that's a nice time to stop, I'd say. Here's a look at most of the team:

I expect that in the next update, we'll beat this game.
It may or may not take place before Halloween this year, when I plan to finally start the Final Fantasy 1 Monster Party playthrough I've been talking about for ages!

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part IV

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:34:44 GMT

I started chapter 4 of my OR4M playthrough based on wpot's rules on October 18th. It was a fairly small start, but I guess I did enough that it might be worth summarizing now, especially considering how much material there is in chapter 4 of this game.

Chapter 4 opens up the map considerably, and by OR4M rules it also means you can use literally any monster other than the two higher tiers of hydra (I think they are Greater Hydra and Tiamat in this version). Right away, I noticed I now had access to Bervenia Volcano. I happen to know this is a good source of a few monster types, including Behemoths!

On my first trip in, I happened to encounter Aithon the Exploder and his skeletal pals. I managed to recruit him.

I've had Semele the Grenade sitting around at a pitiful level for ages hoping I'd get an Exploder, since AoE is pretty rare among monsters, but it hadn't come together yet. It was actually pretty excited for this guy. I promptly dismissed my Grenades.

On my very next time entering the volcano, I met Minyas the Behemoth! Behemoths are pretty great. I was excited for this, too.

Amazing. I also had my generics running errands all around Ivalice, and this had my monsters breeding more. As before, this is a nice opportunity to get more monsters at competitive levels and, in some cases, with better brave. While I am allowed to modify my brave and faith, spending a ton of turns on this isn't viable since it would creep Ramza's level too high.

Amid all of the errands and whatnot, I went to Goug.

This started a chain of events related to Beowulf and Reis, which is nice, because Reis is usable as a Holy Dragon. In the Ivalice Chronicles version of the game, these new events are all nicely indicated on the map. In this new version, Ramza still orders milk, so I guess that wasn't just some wonky mid-90s censorship.

Beowulf joined us and we started the Gollund Colliery events.

My monsters utterly crushed the battles in Gollund. I had the Behemoth pinning down a chemist and casting Gigaflare at one on a higher ledge. Finally, this is an attack that can hit arbitrary heights, and huge areas, and it casts instantly! This felt amazing.

I hadn't remembered that the second colliery fight had a couple of hidden monsters in it! I really wanted Ramza to recruit the King Behemoth here, because why not? King Behemoths are a little better than Behemoths statistically, and their Beastmastery ability is Twister which can be really nice against bosses. This seemed like a good opportunity.

That said... this was not an easy recruitment. Bad zodiac compatibility meant that Ramza was given a 20% chance to recruit this creature. I am sure he had to attempt it over ten times. At least the rest of the battle was very manageable. Beowulf kept coming close to killing the King Behemoth, too, requiring my chocobo have to cure it. I even aimed some Blasters at Beowulf! Those didn't end up working.
Eventually, it came together, with the King Behemoth as the last enemy on the field.

Yuck, this guy is going to need a new name.

The next battle was fine. The chemists were annoying but Erato the Vampire Cat petrified one of them early on. Gigaflare was the MVP.

For the underground battle in the colliery shaft, it was... weird. I thought I planned well, but it turns out Behemoths can't jump well and thus Minyas had some trouble contributing.

The Ahrimans here managed to inflict doom on both Ramza and Minyas. Reis didn't need a whole lot of help, though, and what was needed Boco and Erato were able to provide. Erato was able to inflict stop on the demon, which was pretty cool.

With this, we permanently recruited Reis and Beowulf! Beowulf we'll never use again, but Reis is pretty neat.

There's an optional rule in wpot's guide that you can uncurse Reis and use her as an alternate beastmaster. I am going to choose not to do this.

I noted in the shaft battle that Reis' breath attacks were awfully strong. I compared her stats to those of my blue dragons: their MA stats were in the low 20s, but Reis' is 31!

Despite having Reis the Holy Dragon on the team, I'm still looking forward to having a Red Dragon. I haven't recruited a Red Dragon, nor any the other newly available monsters yet other than Behemoths. The other new chapter 4 monsters are Red Dragon, Red Chocobo, Cockatrice, and Hydra. I should be able to get a Red Chocobo with relative ease nice and soon at Finnath Creek, so I might just wait for that.

We've done lots of preparatory tasks for chapter 4, including a significant part of the side quest chain. The rest of the side quest chain, like Worker 8 and Cloud, aren't actually very useful for us, so I might just skip all of that. Next time I play I'll actually get into the chapter 4 story battles.

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part III

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:51:04 GMT

I played chapter 3 of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles under wpot's OR4M rules between October 12th and October 19th.

At the end of the previous entry, I said that Neil the Minotaur and Musa the Coeurl might not be on my team for long. Wandering around for some errands indeed got me a reasonably-levelled Sekhret, Thamyris, and so Thamyris joined up. For the moment, there were no other big shifts in my team's composition despite having most of the tier 3 monsters now available.

Chapter 3 starts out with the battle where Orran joins you. If you're lucky, he casts Galaxy Stop or whatever it's called now and you have an easy time. That is... precisely what happened. Ramza started to lower Thamyris' faith and otherwise the battle was a piece of cake.

Next, we did the battle leaving Lesalia where Alma joins us. If I recall correctly, I took a second attempt at this one. It was about a week ago so I don't actually recall perfectly; it may have been because an important monster perma-died or something. I decided to bring a Squidraken for some reason and I don't know if it even got to land a hit.

Thamyris squished Zalmour.

The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game has delightful notifications when the shops get upgraded. I took a walk down to Goug to get Ramza an upgraded gun.

Next up was the multi-stage battle at Orbonne. Again, these segments of the game have a pretty neat little map screen which I think looks fantastic.

The first battle, in Vaults - Second Level, was actually kind of hard on my first attempt. My monsters are mostly several levels below the enemies in story battles, given the level 20 cap at the end of chapter 2, and Musa has had some trouble keeping up. Blaster is still very useful when I can set it up! But its utility in these fights made it more apparent that I would benefit from recruiting a Vampire Cat.

On the attempt where we won it was pretty decisive.

The next battle was against Isilud. This also wasn't done on my first attempt. I situated the team pretty badly in formation the first time; clearly it was important to get my stronger, less mobile units up on the walls and closer to Isilud. Instead, I had one of them move toward the summoner, and that generally didn't go well.

On the winning attempt, I treated it much more like the assassination-style battle it is. Ramza shot Isilud and then the monsters got him down to critical. You can see I brought a Steel Hawk - and it was fairly useful, actually, although it was down at the end of the fight.

Next up was exiting the vaults, where we encountered Wiegraf. It's funny, because in perusing the board for this game on GameFAQs, I saw Sharebear420 having trouble with this fight and nobody else seemed to sympathize. It was rough! Now, admittedly, I am operating under a lot of constraints that Sharebear and the other posters don't have. I found that, regardless of formation, Wiegraf would move forward before I could act and use Hallowed Bolt, killing at least one monster and significantly weakening others. This screenshot, for example, was from before my first action:

You can see there are some problems there. Since he can 100% OHKO Ramza before Ramza's movement, I had to set the formation in such a way that he couldn't resist hitting someone else. I would accept him killing a Chocobo and/or Musa the Coeurl, and then hope that Ramza (whose Pisces sign made his gun quite effective against Wiegraf) and the bulkier monsters could pull it out.

What was really frustrating was one occasion where it was barely coming together... and my remaining Malboro had a shot on Wiegraf's back... but couldn't actually attack because a Malboro's Tentacles attack only has a vertical tolerance of 1. It can't attack up stairs!

Eventually though, it came together. The team was Boco the Chocobo (dead instantly), Musa the Coeurl (dead instantly), Ramza (dead on turn 2), Thamyris the Sekhret, and Typhon the Blue Dragon. It ended up with Typhon as the only unit remaining, just above half health but without enough to withstand another attack from Wiegraf, getting one attempt at an Ice Breath from the front. It had a 75% chance to end the fight, and a 25% chance to be another defeat. This one came out on my side.

What's kind of funny in all this is how amazingly irrelevant Wiegraf's several mages and archers were. They basically didn't matter at all. The other thing that sort of startled me a bit is, at some point after, I checked the tips for this fight from wpot's O4RM guide and it practically just says, "Just beat him.", as if this were super easy! It was not.

The next part of my quest would eventually take me to the challenging fights at the end of the chapter, and I knew I'd need some preparation. My monsters were breeding as I walked, and this was sort of an okay way to get higher-levelled units in general. (The generic humans I had been keeping, one of whom was level 4, worked against this effort, but it wasn't too bad.) Despite all the breeding, I still wasn't getting a Mindflayer or a Vampire Cat... but Balias Swale quickly yielded a Mindflayer and a Gobbledygook, which is pretty great.

I figured a Gobbledygook could eventually be pretty important against a boss using its Beastmaster ability, although I also had a revenant now.

I had trouble locating a Vampire Cat regardless, and Musa wasn't having babies. I looked at a couple of guides but finding exhaustive lists of where to find monsters with which chapter it became available was... inconsistent. I ended up just doing Grogh Heights. Kapys the Mindflayer was an enormous asset in this fight, and my Malboro's Bad Breath was amazingly useful at one point as well.

I really wanted that Vampire Cat, so after consulting yet another guide - this one by QuMarsh - I went back to Balias Swale. This got really annoying. I got into a really stupid rhythm of starting and resetting battles again and again. Despite reloading being a lot easier than it was in the PS1 era, it's kind of silly that you can't exit a battle from the formation screen.

It probably took 20+ instances of this nonsense, but eventually we met and befriended Erato the Vampire Cat.

I should say: with all of the breeding and recruiting I've had a lot of monsters. When I get a lot of extras of a species, I eliminate the lowest-levelled ones and in some cases the ones with the lowest brave. I like renaming monsters sometimes to make their names meaningful or silly or just generally more relatable than the default nonsense syllables. One of my kids has walked in and asked to see my team and when he learned monsters could be renamed, he renamed several of my monsters for me.

If you see monsters being added/removed or possibly just under different names, this is why.
For the most part, I haven't been renaming the core team so I can refer to them with some continuity.

Yardrow Fort city took a few tries, mostly based on how stupid Rapha decided to be. I will say, in the winning attempt (my third, I believe) she also got really lucky with a Heaven Thunder one-shotting one of the ninjas.

Thamyris was too slow to be particularly effective in this fight, but those idle turns meant using a lot of Beef Up. Consequently, when Thamyris went to land the final blow it was for 264 of this summoner's 7 HP. This somehow made Thamyris the greatest contributor.

The Yuguewood was actually simple, and was a first try with no issues.

Next up was the three-part battle at Riovanes Castle, where the second and third part are among the most frustrating battles in the game. It surprised me that the first wasn't great either, in part because my monsters kept getting poached!

This is something I might never have observed in prior playthroughs. Even on my winning attempt, my Chocobo got poached, but it was Dadameia instead of Boco so I kept on trucking. I was very glad to have gone back to get a Vampire Cat, as Erato was able to petrify one archer and keep another stop-locked.

Eventually we won. It's funny the way these battles can swing, because often - but not always - it feels like I lose and it's not even close or I win and it's not even close.

Unsurprisingly, Wiegraf was a big jerk. This battle generally requires a specialized setup, and with my forced orator job and my level constraints I expected it to be bad. Here was my initial setup for Ramza.

This was my initial formation. Yes, this Gobbledygook was named by my son. I am very proud.

This would turn out to not be ideal for several reasons. For one minor thing, I should've put Thamyris the Sekhret closer to the action. For another, I forgot to replace Ramza's Item command with Mettle. Despite this, I beat Wiegraf and moved into the Belias phase on my first attempt!

This level of success did not continue.

On my next attempt, I remembered Mettle and fixed up the formation a bit. Ramza even dodged Wiegraf's first Aurablast! I pumped his speed up to 22 or so with Tailwind and shot down a demon or two. The bad part of this was I was pushed up to level 30.

The even worse part was that I didn't win anyway because all of my monsters were dead/petrified before Ramza could win regardless.

On the winning attempt, I buffed Ramza's speed but to a greater extent and then - using my brain here - I targeted Belias instead of the goons. Sure, the team took a lot of damage, but this was a damage race. With help from Talaos the Revenant, we won that race!

Of course, chapter 3 isn't quite over yet. We've still got the stupid rooftop battle.
Now, I need you to know that I really like this game, but this part was completely idiotic game design. I can't imagine any intelligent player ever who didn't eclipse level 50 who ever beat this battle first try. It's such a fickle battle, and you can't prepare Rapha for it if you wanted to. I truly wonder how this was tested and considered okay by the original developers. It's awful.
I can't imagine with this pre-amble that you would think this was going to go well, right?

Well, it didn't go well.
On a couple of early attempts, Rapha walked down the castle roof, and I thought everything was going to be cool. Unfortunately, Celia joined her there and tore her apart.

This all happened before Ramza could even act. The only control I had over this was boosting his speed by 1 additional point with Hermes Shoes, so I did that.

Now I could do things, but it seemed like most of the actions Ramza took made Rapha even more suicidal. Over maybe ten attempts, she was two-shot in so many spectacular ways. I tried controlling the battle using Ramza's orator abilities, but Lettie and Elmdore can't be put to sleep anyway.

Somehow, eventually, Lettie decided to throw (literally or figuratively lol) instead of attacking directly and this gave Erato the Vampire Cat a single shot at Celia. I chose for Erato to use Cat Scratch and, with it rolling slightly on the high side, it was enough to put Celia into critical status and end the fight.

Elmdore's characterization in this part of the game is an awful lot better than earlier versions, by the way. It really makes the point that he's not just a monster, and that in fact he's thankful to Ramza for what happened in chapter 1. I guess he's still monstrous, but reluctantly, and that's sort of interesting.

With that, we're done chapter 3! Those last few fights sure were stupid.
With chapter 4 incoming we have access to a lot of new and interesting monsters now! I'll be starting to recruit some of those soon. In fact, I already started chapter 4 but let's end this entry here.

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part II

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:52:36 GMT

I finished chapter 2 between October 7th and 11th. There were some rough patches, but it generally went well. After my first post, I also started a GameFAQs thread related to this.

The start of chapter 2 is odd. I took on Lavian, Alicia and Ladd (sp?) for the sake of doing errands but I also had Agrias and Gaffgarion. Thus, the battles feel not only on the easy side, but you barely notice that most of the characters are monsters. This was the case right away in Dorter the second.

Before continuing, I did a few random things. I made my generics complete the errands that were available early, and then realizing that that swamp that used to start with "Z" was coming up I thought I'd benefit from getting a floating enemy like a Bomb. I popped up to the Zeklaus Desert and recruited a Grenade.

In Araguay Woods, I thought the beastmastery thing to do was to protect Boco.

This was a very simple fight. I brought all non-Chocobo units thinking that Boco should count as a monster on my team. This probably didn't end up mattering as Boco mostly just stayed in his corner.

I went straight to Zeirchele Falls, after changing Gaffgarion's job to "nudist".

As I discussed before, you can't change guest characters' command abilities in this version, so he'll keep Item.
During this battle, one of my kids wandered into the room where I was playing. What was funny was, with Ovelia, Agrias, Delita and Gaffgarion around the fight didn't even look like one where monsters were particularly featured - like, it doesn't even resemble a variant playthrough.

It was fairly easy to keep things under control, although you can see one of my monsters was knocked out. Ramza kept a lot of knights and Gaffgarion asleep for much of the fight.

Zaland took two tries. There were some things that went well the first time, but I misjudged how high the Dragon could jump and sort of squandered a couple of early turns that I believe caught up with me. It definitely didn't help that a knight with Geomancy used Carve Model to turn my chocobo into a statue. The second try was fine, though.

Now, Balias Tor. This one took two tries. Again, getting opponents to sleep to just sway the action economy to our side was key.

There were a lot of cutscenes around this part. As I said before, a lot of things were easier to understand... or perhaps the meaning was even tweaked. I'm honestly not sure. Ovelia saying, "I was to be the adopted daughter of my late brother" was something I never understood previously.

There's also the part where, in other versions, Dycedarg says to Gaffgarion something along the lines of "your head can easily be removed" which I always thought was one of his coldest, coarsest, character-defining lines. It's very different now.

Well, now it's off toward Goug... with Tchigolith Fenlands next. I had been really mindful of this one coming up, and that's why I really wanted a floating enemy like Semele the Grenade. This still took me over 10 resets because I really wanted to recruit the early Swine.

Again, the restart option was fairly quick but when I picked "Restart the battle" it felt like the seed was always the same. I did this many, many times testing things out. Eventually, I got better luck after going back to the formation screen. That said, even my first battle with a Swine in it didn't go well because I split the team up too much.

Eventually, we got it! Samele's Flame Attack was pretty handy here.

In addition to getting the Swine, we recruited our first Ghoul here.

The Goug battle actually took two tries. On the second, successful attempt it was rather decisive. I don't even feel like I was doing anything particularly wrong in the first place, instead legitimately having bad luck.

I used Musa the Coeurl again here, which I really enjoyed. Blaster isn't very accurate (yet) but it's really nice when it works.

We crossed the sea to Warjilis and did the Balias Swale battle. We said geronimo to help Agrias, and it was pretty easy. You can see that Musa landed a Blaster to petrify an enemy here.

Well, this was fine. Really, though there were a few mis-steps and a few fights that've taken more than one try, I thought I'd attempt Golgollada Gallows.

It didn't go well. You can see here that Boco the Chocobo is level 12. I knew I'd need some preparation. I actually spent a fair bit of time levelling, reducing faith and buffing brave at Balias Swale only to realize: I never got an upgraded dragon! Oops. A Blue Dragon would probably be a serious asset.

Well... I don't have a ton of options for breeding here. I got rid of some of my lowest-levelled monsters and then... started walking back and forth on the longest safe route in the game.

Gross.
This took a while.
This sucked but it had some other benefits. Every so often a baby monster would be born with a higher level than its parents, so that sort of helped. Eventually, we got baby Typhon the Blue Dragon. I took this new recruit and my other highest-levelled mainstays to Balias Swale for some levelling and br/fa manipulation. I even managed to make use of this old standby grinding setup:

My monsters would whack each other while getting cured by Boco, and Ramza would repeatedly lower their faith and then attempt to raise their bravery. Ramza got much closer to the cap than everyone else; I decided we should be done when Ramza had attained level 17. You can see I also managed to recruit a Steel Hawk in this battle.

By the way: I'm fairly sure but not positive that doing this version of the fight before Golgollada Gallows was impossible in prior versions of the game. In this version, you can access the Golgollada battle and escape to approach Balias Swale from the west even before winning at Golgollada. It is somewhat peculiar that this ended up mattering, but it did.

We went back to Golgollada Gallows with our upgraded squad. It went much, much better.

Now, Typhon the Blue Dragon is very nice, but everyone truly got their moment in this fight. Musa's Blaster usage was essential. This next screenshot shows two knights stopped and one asleep! It was quite manageable.

Next was the gate at Lionel Castle. Check out the fancy screen they added for multi-battle areas.

This battle was tough, mainly because it was fairly essential that Ramza survive his cage match with Gaffgarion.

After finding it too hard when Gaffgarion came outside, I abandoned the idea of having Ramza heal himself repeatedly with Hi Potions and instead trying to put Gaffgarion asleep. The game told me that the odds of this working were over 70%, but I failed five times in a row and went back to the Hi Potions. On this second attempt just having Ramza heal himself instead of going for the Mimic Darlavon, we pulled through.

As a part of this, Ramza did eventually get Gaffgarion to have a nap, but it didn't matter too much.

For the interior, I decided to put a Protect Ring on Ramza. You can see he was level 19 here!

This took two tries, again, in part because my original formation was pretty bad and meant every single monster got put to sleep or condemned. It was hard to recover from. I also originally had Samele the Grenade in there, but Samele seems to have rather bad stats/brave and its damage was super low. I decided to bring back trusty ol' Musa the Coeurl. Regardless, even my eventual victory was a bit close for comfort.

And with that, we're done chapter 2! I don't have a bunch of tier 3 monsters ready yet, but I think I'd have trouble moving on from these monsters. I've gone easy on the bravery buffs just because of level gains, but also I recognize that it's hard to keep monsters adequately levelled and at some point spending the time buffing them won't feel worthwhile.

Despite this, I might be a little attached to Boco, Musa, Neil and Typhon! I sort of know that Musa and Neil will need to be replaced fairly soon.

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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part I

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:21:13 GMT

As I wrote just two days ago, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles was released earlier this week. I took some personal time and sacrificed a bit of sleep to play it, which frankly felt really good. Games are my favourite way to make my brain relax, and it's much more effective when I'm not streaming! Plus, time is at a premium right now and playing FFT on my Switch makes it really easy for me to pick it up and play regardless of how much time I've got, when I can be interrupted (which happens a lot!) or which other systems my kids think they need to use. Consequently, after starting to play it mid-day yesterday, October 4th, I was actually able to put in a few hours before bed last night.

There's a poster on the Final Fantasy Tactics board on GameFAQs - where I'm not particularly active - named wpot, who is at least mildly obsessed with a challenge called MR4M or OR4M. This stands for "Mediator/Orator Ramza 4 Monsters", where Ramza plays the role of the "beastmaster" and leads four different monsters at all times. wpot's posts have caught my attention a few times, and I do mean a few times because I've found discussion of the challenge from May 2013, October 2016, November 2016, February 2017, October 2017, January 2024 and November 2024. Not every one of these topics was created by wpot, but most were, and it's not like having a monster-focused party wasn't explored before May 2013! That quantity of separate board topics is also probably a bit inflated and silly-looking because the FFT PlayStation board used to be separate from the FFT PSP board, and now they're merged. I don't consider wpot to be completely unhinged with regards to this challenge.

wpot eventually created a posted guide to the OR4M challenge for the War of the Lions version of the game. It's great!
My intent is to follow wpot's established rules for O4RM during my inaugural playthrough of this new version of the game, even though with some of the balance changes it may have differences in terms of difficulty, strategy... or perhaps whether it's even possible or not.

Mostly pulled directly from wpot's guide, here are the rules, the way I'll be following them - which ignores the optional rules:

Rule 1:

Upon reaching the Slums of Dorter battle in Chapter 1 your party must consist of ONLY monsters and Ramza. Guest humans are allowed while they are mandatory guests – they are mandatory, after all - but nobody else.

Reis the Holy Dragon is a monster and may be used [...]. Reis the human, however, is human and cannot be used [...]. Construct 8 and the Byblos are 'demons', not monsters, and may not be used.

Rule 2:

All of your units (both Ramza and the monsters) must remain at or below level:

10 during Chapter 1
20 during Chapter 2
30 during Chapter 3
50 during Chapter 4

The challenge gets easier as these limits are approached; I would suggest not leveling intentionally at all until you find that fights are becoming too difficult.

Rule 3:

Only one monster from each family can be used at a time. The challenge isn't very interesting if you simply use four Chocobos for every battle. There are a lot of other quality monsters out there and the idea is to use as many as possible!

Rule 4:

High-tier monsters cannot be used early in the game. This helps to further ensure people are mixing things up and preserves the challenge of the early Chapters. Specifically, only the following may be used:

Tier 1 monsters during Chapter 1
Tier 1 & 2 monsters during Chapter 2
All available monsters during Chapter 3 EXCEPT the Red Chocobo, Red Dragon, Cockatrice, and Behemoths
ALL monsters (except the Tiamat and Greater Hydra) during Chapter 4

Rule 5:

Ramza must act as a "beastmaster" during the challenge. [...] Ramza must be modeled into a beastmaster by using him as an Orator. Orators are relatively normal humans who have Beast Tongue innate and they can therefore naturally 'Entice' monsters [...]. To make Ramza more functional in his support role he is also allowed to learn and equip some skills from the starter jobs: both Item and Mettle are allowed, as are the Squire Reaction/Support/Movement skills.

However, the Chemist Reaction/Support/Movement skills are NOT allowed as they are somewhat too powerful. No Auto-Potion!

To be specific, Ramza:

Must ONLY fight in the Orator class during story battles. During random battles he may fight as a Squire or Chemist to gain JP (or other jobs as needed to open Orator in the first place).
May ONLY equip Mettle or Item as a secondary skill. [...]
May only equip Squire or Orator Reaction skills. Yes, this means only Counter Tackle or Earplug (should even you bother learning them). No Auto-Potion!
May only equip monster-themed Support skills (Beastmaster or Tame). JP Boost is only allowed during random battles to avoid gaining too many levels. No Throw Items!
Must only equip Squire or Orator Movement skills. So: Move+1 it is! Be glad you have it.

Rule 6:

Ramza can equip whatever he likes with the exception of the elemental guns, the Stoneshooter, and the Ras Algethi (they’re too powerful and/or don’t fit the theme).

Rule 7:

Ramza cannot use Entice on humans; a true beastmaster wouldn't want humans on his team [...]. More practically, Entice can make a big difference in some battles and we don't want Ramza to be the star.

Rule 8:

Bravery and Faith modification ARE allowed. Raising a monster's permanent Bravery to 80 or higher is prohibited, however. This affects the challenge level to a degree and, even more importantly, it's boring and it discourages you from allowing monsters to die...which is part of the fun.

And that's the end of the rules! There are two optional rules that generally make things easier or allow more choice, but I'm not going to use either of those.

As I said, I'm intending to follow these rules as strictly as reasonably possible. I don't agree with every aspect of them, like the Stoneshooter being overpowered - I think it's got a good enough tradeoff. I also find the Chapter 3 monster restrictions a little on the arbitrary side, but I respect the intent so I'll go along with these rules as written.

When you start Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, you get a choice of playing the "classic" version of the "The Ivalice Chronicles" version. I wanted to see the new stuff and spot the differences, so I went with "The Ivalice Chronicles".

When it describes the version differences, it mostly sounds like modernization and quality-of-life improvements... but it does say "optimized game balance" and that does make me wonder if there will be an impact on the gameplay related to this challenge.

There's also a difficulty selection.

I went with "Knight", for something close to the traditional difficulty and balance although I don't know the specifics of how any of these work. I didn't want to be too casual, and I didn't select "Tactician" because I worried that my dependence on monsters was more likely to render the game unwinnable on a higher difficulty setting. At wpot's advice, I picked a Pisces birthday: February 19th.

This new version of the game has very nice presentation. The voice acting all sounds pretty same-y, and maybe a little monotone in places where the actors struggle to deal with the weird choice of words, but on the whole I like it. The little animated mouths are fun. I didn't skip too much... especially when I saw a bizarre word or phrase that I really wanted to hear.

For the introductory battle at Orbonne, I literally just had Ramza sit still and wait every turn while my OP friends slaughtered everyone.

The new features like the combat timeline were really cool - this is much better than viewing the AT list. Whereas in older FFT, you spend a lot of time pressing select to view help menus and lists and such, most of the information is now onscreen. I wasn't used to this at first, but I sort of came to like it. It doesn't feel too crowded.

For the next two plot battles, at Gariland and Mandalia Plains, I had to get Ramza moving toward the orator class. The requirements for orator are level 2 chemist to unlock white mage, level 3 white mage to unlock mystic, and level 3 mystic to unlock orator. The formation screen is really nice compared to the original, and I was able to change Ramza's job (and that of some allies) to chemist before the battle started.

This enabled me to unlock white mage right away in Gariland.

I'd use the forced plot battle in Mandalia Plains to grind a bit to unlock mystic (née oracle) and a second random battle there to unlock orator! I got it all done in these few battles, as wpot had prescribed.

The version difference presented itself in a few minor ways this early in the game. For one thing, Reequip/Equip Change now cost 50 JP to learn, whereas in the original FFT it was a completely free ability.

For another, a chemist is now able to find items as if they have Move-Find/Treasure Hunter without learning or equipping the ability. This actually happened to me twice on Mandalia Plains by total accident.

Anyway, I unlocked orator for Ramza at the low, low level of 4, and learned Entice.

I did two more random battles in Mandalia Plains before heading to Eagrose. In the first one, I recruited a Chocobo and a Goblin and in the second I recruited a Red Panther.

It was very fun that my first Entice ever was successful, and with 28% odds.

Now that I had three monster allies, plus Delita and Argath, I didn't really need so many humans anymore. I'm not really sure how the rules handle carrying generics around to do propositions later so I just kept the humans around barely equipped and unused.

This version of the game sort of still has random encounters; if you're on a combat space and you select it, you can choose for a fight to happen at all... and if you cross a space and a random battle pops up, you've got the option to just leave. This ended up being somewhat abusable to keep my levels low enough for chapter 1 without the awful, time-consuming process of resetting the original FFT game.

I did Sweegy Woods/Siedge Wield with my new monster squad and my guest characters. There were Bombs, but I failed to recruit them before my team slaughtered them and Ramza didn't have Item on.

I did a second battle here immediately thinking it would be an asset to get a Bomb on the team, and instead in the random battle there was... nothing useful. I had noticed in the pause menu that there was an option to exit the battle and return to the world map, so I tried that out. It's literally just a cost-free escape option. Amazing. I had been worried as I don't believe I'd saved before this low-reward battle popped up.

With another crack at it, I got a battle in Siedge Wield that included Skeletons and a Wisenkin/Minotaur! Now that's useful. I was able to recruit both, although this battle ended up quite on the chaotic side. At some point I guess my Chocobo died? But it had laid an egg so I didn't even notice until later. I realize now, from these screenshots, that the original Chocobo died in the previous battle. I guess I hadn't grown very attached yet.


Now Ramza had a Goblin, a Skeleton, a Red Panther, a Chocobo, and a Wisenkin as allies before the first real battle of this (or nearly any other) challenge format for this game. I was level 6 though, so I knew I'd need to do fewer random battles to stay under the cap.

Time for Dorter! While this is often sort of a wake-up call fight in this game, it wasn't too hard for us. Our Chocobo and Wisenkin allies were both very tough. I knew I could take advantage of the Chocobo's mobility... and in fact, since you save quite a bit of money by not outfitting humans and fighting multiple random battles I had bought Delita and Argath both some Battle Boots, so crossing the battlefield was pretty easy.

Speaking of Delita and Argath though, here's a funny thing about this game version: You cannot change a guest character's job or equipped job ability. Delita and Argath are both squires with Item no matter what. It doesn't matter too much, but it's a change I noticed.

The Chocobo used its mobility to climb up toward the archer, supported by Delita and Argath, while the Wisenkin, Skeleton and Ramza crossed the bottom. The Skeleton got hit with Fire eventually but otherwise it was very manageable.


This takes us to the sand ra-a-a-a-ats. It was a good fight - on the easy side. The Chocobo supported Delita and everyone else blocked up the door where Argath starts. It was great.

Next up, Thieves' Fort or whatever it's called. This one actually took me three tries. Milleuda was pretty mean on a few occasions with Rapid Fist/Pummel. Ramza had been saving up to learn Mimic Darlavon as his second Speechcraft ability, so it was fun and useful to put some of the enemy thieves to sleep. The victory was a bit squeezed-out, though, with Ramza dead and the Chocobo and Wisenkin ganging up on Milleuda to end the fight with about one round of leeway.

I happened to learn during this stormy battle that my Skeleton's Thunder Anima wakes up sleeping opponents. I was under the impression that it behaved more like a magic spell, so this was disappointing.

I stripped Argath before he left. In Lenalia Plateau, Mimic Darlavon was again sort of the MVP move. Keeping some of the enemies down managed the threat level and allowed my Wisenkin and Chocobo to do their best work. The first Mimic Darlavon came in clutch stopping a Fira spell that Milleuda's black mage friend was aiming at us.

I don't know if it's the translation or the voice acting in this new version of the game, but I find the plot easier to follow and the characters easier to understand. The ones the game wants you to like, like Milleuda, feel more likeable, and the despicable ones, like Dycedarg, feel more despicable. I've been enjoying the general presentation a lot.

Next was the windmill battle at Fovoham. This one didn't go well at all. I believe I needed four runs at it, and after the first two I actually adjusted my formation a bit to make my monsters more effective.

It generally started out well enough, but Wiegraf had a nasty habit of targetting Ramza with a Cleaning Strike/Split Punch that did more damage than Ramza's max HP. This happened in three battles. There were also an annoying number of times that my Wisenkin ally was insta-killed by Northswain's Strike/Crush Punch.

Each time, with Delita being unable to learn Phoenix Down, the only option left is for every monster to full-out attack Wiegraf to see if they can end the fight. Eventually this exact methodology is what worked, with my Skeleton bringing Wiegraf into critical HP and ending the fight. This is one of those scenarios where the in-battle dialogue will bring a character from 0 HP to 1 HP, I think, but this battle was already over.

I thought carefully about options before heading the next fight at Fort Ziekden. After all, after Ziekden I'd lose access to some of these areas. I'm glad I did this, because there are Dragons in Lenalia Plateau! I escaped one fight where there were no useful enemies and then recruited a new Dragon buddy.

I also did one extra battle in Fovoham and there were squid fellas and eyeball guys. I got a new eyeball guy but I'm not sure whether it'll be useful or not.

Anyway, onto Ziekden! I had one false start where I quickly realized I had left Ramza in the squire class after the random battles I was just doing. I won on the second try, but there were a lot of close calls! We had some good luck with putting the enemies to sleep, in some cases cancelling some nasty spells! Others were less avoidable.
I did a move here a few times where Ramza was being targetted with a black magic, so he would use his recently-learned Enlighten ability to lower his faith and then stand beside the caster, who would substantially damage themself while Ramza survived. Then my Chocobo would go over to him and use Choco Cure. It was great.

This is also the first battle where Ramza's Beastmaster ability mattered, at least somewhat. My Wisenkin was able to use Beef Up, and my Dragon used Tail Whip a few times which did pretty great damage on at least one occasion.

It was the Dragon who eventually took Argath down.

With that... we're all done chapter 1 already! Wow, this sure seems to be moving along a lot faster than my last Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough! We didn't violate any rules, although many of us were around level 9.

This is pretty fun so far! I'm appreciating the differences between the different monsters and I can see how their varying expendability is going to change the way I play. It's still possible that the rebalancing in this version will throw me a nasty curve ball, I suppose.

Here's the team thus far:

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Things Happening in Fall 2025

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 13:52:51 GMT

This is probably the most blog-like post this blog has ever had thus far.

There are some things that have been happening that are impacting me quite a bit, as well as the state of this site and my ability to play games, and I thought I'd just comment on some of it. Maybe we can all consider this a form of venting.

First of all, I work at a college in Ontario, Canada. Right now, the college support staff are on strike, and this is having a rather nasty impact on myself and other people I care about. It's an odd situation where the root cause is a lack of funding - which you could reasonably say is caused by our provincial government. You can also go ahead and blame the federal government, since they more-or-less quashed international student recruitment as a supplementary revenue stream. Thus, this whole issue is very much a non-partisan thing, since it's all levels and multiple parties causing the problems. The root causes of the strike absolutely cannot be addressed without revisiting the funding model so it's rough, as strikes go. My friend GamerDad talked about it nicely here.

Part of what this strike action is doing is causing issues with me getting to work. Getting into the office is taking roughly an extra hour daily. I still have to parent, so I can't "gain time" by going to work early, and I still have to run my household and/or take kids to extracurriculars when I get home. So what's going to give? Either the quality of my work, the quantity of my sleep, or my flexible time. So far it's a mixture but all of it is leaving me in a very unpleasant state. I have things I want to do, like programming projects related to variant runs (like the monster party) that I can't find the time for, and I generally feel like I'm running on empty.

Summarizing the above, the first thing that's happening is, due to local politics, I'm feeling crappy and have no free time. There's no clear end in sight but it will very likely wrap up before the end of 2025.

The next thing that's been happening lately is Imgur has gotten stupider. The auto-moderation got out of hand about a month ago and the users sort of protested, and things weren't looking good for the site. A fair number of users were leaving, although things seemed to settle in the last few weeks. Then, more recently, in response to a UK privacy law, Imgur stopped serving images to the UK entirely. I sort of knew the site was a sinking ship but this is sort of a breaking point for me.

Every gameplay image on this site to date - probably around 1500 images - is currently hosted on Imgur (yet another idea I more-or-less yoinked from sirsystemerror). At some point when I can manage the time, I'm going to be gradually migrating everything to a new platform. I think I've picked the one I'm going to go with but I won't name it here since (a) it could still change and (b) that platform will probably be enshittified eventually, too. Regardless, it'll take some time to get this site reorganized and hopefully still show images to people in different parts of the world.

Anyway... what is next?

The Final Fantasy Tactics remaster came out this week and I've got my copy but haven't started yet. When I can, I'm going to play it, but I'm not going to stream it mostly because of the aforementioned time constraints. My intent is to play a M4RM/O4RM variant, off the bat! I'll still document that but without video. It might be on the slow side... but honestly, probably still not as slow as my last Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough!

I hope I'll be able to do some other variant thing before the year is out. The idea backlog continues to grow.

Although it isn't variant play, I think I might also do a little write-up of some of the other games I've spent any substantial time with since the image transfer from the Switch 2 actually seems kind of dope. This year I've played a bunch of Mario Kart World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and mostly recently, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line.

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part VII

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 18:08:13 GMT

I concluded this Side Quest Challenge playthrough on September 6, 2025 - although I guess it was actually September 7th in the end.

I haven't really noted it, but in addition to doing these write-ups as usual, I've also been posting to this GameFAQs thread throughout. It's not bustlin', but there have been some reactions and a small number of new quests. Between the prior session and this one, we've ended up with six new quests... meaning we now have quests to unlock every single weapon, armor and spell in the game! Many of the new ones didn't have the "stories" that all of the older ones did, but that's okay.

I started out with some wandering around in lava to lower our HP. This was intended to make it so that Vivi was the only surviving character, although had some other effects, too.

Title: If You Can Dodge A ___

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: As their journey progresses, the party's thief has made some evasive actions that will be included in tales throughout the ages. The more party's black mage sees this, the more they think they could use magic to manipulate an enemy's evasive techniques.

Requirement: The black mage must be alive when a physical attack misses the thief while the thief is in critical (kneeling) HP.

Unlocks: (b)Focara

Since I had all the characters so low and Vivi in good condition, I just wandered up to a clump of Goblins and had Locke dodge them with critical HP.

I did not end up actually buying the Focara spell.

Title: Hey I Can Use That Too

Author: hawkeyerules (2020)

Story: The black mage watched as the party's white mage cast (w)NulShock on the party and thought how wonderful it would be to use lightning as a damaging spell. They started reading all the tomes of magic that they possibly could and still found nothing. He did, however, learn that Matoya had knowledge that preceded the books. It seemed like if someone would pay Matoya a visit and run an errand for her, they could cast (b)Thunder with the best of them.

Requirement: With (w)NulShock unlocked, starting from Matoya's cave with a character who can cast (b)Thunder leading the group, fight and kill a solo Shark, a 5 Buccaneer formation and finally a 4 Goblin formation.

Unlocks: (b)Thunder

This one I had been sort of putting off since very early on. Normally, you'd be able to do it as soon as you got the ship in Pravoka! At least in prior versions. With the new encounters the way they are, there's no such thing as a "solo Shark". However, the right kind of pedantic idiot could, in theory, parse the phrase "fight and kill a solo Shark" as "fight and kill a Shark on your own"... right??? I mean, I'd already beaten tons of Sharks, and even White Sharks. I decided if I could do this whole thing with Vivi solo, it would still meet the requirement... so that's what I did.

I did not end up actually buying the Thunder spell.

Title: Mage's Inner Strength

Author: Liguar82 (2019)

Story: The master of dragons is said to bestow a great gift on those who prove their courage. Hearing these tales has stirred a sense of courage within the party's black mage.

Requirement: With only the black mage alive, enter the Citadel of Trials and proceed to open the treasure chest that contains the rat's tail (whether or not the tail has already been claimed), and then return to Bahamut and speak to him.

Unlocks: (b)Saber

This is why I actually had Vivi in a solo state. Vivi didn't like running into dinosaur enemies, but other than that it really wasn't too bad.

I did end up getting the... usually not-so-useful Saber spell. I thought it might help with another quest.

Title: Turn Some Blind Eyes

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: After Matoya has restored her sight, she becomes keen on the study of semi-magical optometry so that things like this don't happen again! But to proceed with her research she will require some anatomical samples to learn more about the nature of blindness.

Requirement: After successfully completing Ableism Awareness or The Sound of Nature, defeat at least two Bigeyes, two Deepeyes, and two Evil Eyes.

Unlocks: (b)Blind

Next, I decided to go into the Sunken Shrine to finish this. No real notes! It was strange that I had never encountered Deepeyes nor Ghosts. I made a point to run into both for the sake of the bestiary.

During this stupid trip, I also tried to get the team into a duo state for the Fork Tower quest, and that's why the team looks, y'know, a little on the rough side. I did not end up actually buying the Blind spell.

Title: Quest for Healing

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: Legend has it that those who are proficient at healing can wield a powerful item that can heal at will.

Requirement: One character must deliver over 1000 points of healed HP in a single battle without themself or any of his allies dying before the battle is over. This healing may occur from either spells or potions. Note that only actual points of healing count.

Unlocks: (e)Healing Staff

Between the duo runs for the Fork Tower quest, I had an opportunity to heal massive amounts by having Lenna and Vivi both at 1 HP.

I happened to be near Pravoka so I ran into weak little groups there. Lenna got killed on the first attempt, but the second one worked.

In this battle, Lenna healed a total of 1185 HP.

Title: The Fork Tower

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: The Mirage Tower is said to have a link to a tower in another world where the strongest magics have been sealed away from evil forces. Only cooperation between those who have mastered the physical arts and those who have mastered the magical arts are said to be able to access these abilities.

Requirement: "In two separate trips from the entrance to the Mirage Tower up to the teleporter guarded by the Blue Dragon:

one party may only access the Fight and Run commands
one party may only access the Magic and Run commands

These two parties must be separated such that characters who are alive on one trip are dead throughout the other trip. For example, one might be a duo Knight/Ninja and the other might be a duo White Wizard/Black Wizard."

Unlocks: (b)Flare, (w)Holy

This FF5 reference is one of my favourite cross-game references that I made among the older quests, although it might be a tad on the easy side for such good rewards. Given that its so late in the game, I suppose that doesn't matter. Cecil and Locke went first, with no real issue.

Followed by Lenna and Vivi, using only the Magic and Flee commands. It was hard to help myself from using spellcasting items, actually, especially when I wanted to cast Fira and the Mage's Staff was available. It took me three attempts to just avoid accidentally using items!

With that, we unlocked Holy and Flare! These ones we actually would purchase.

Title: Meltdown

Author: nesplayer (2025)

Requirement: Face a Death Knight and allow it to use Flare. Any party members who can learn (w)Dispel must survive the attack.

Unlocks: (w)Dispel

This is one of the brand new quests. We ran into a Death Knight shortly after the two teams, uh, reconvened in the Flying Fortress. I had been leaving Locke at 1 HP hoping he might be able to help us unlock Protect Cloaks, so he didn't survive the Flare... but Lenna did!

I did not end up actually buying the Dispel spell.

Title: Dimension V

Author: CannonTrys & FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: If your Black Wizard can escape the space station in Dimension V, they should learn how to warp their enemies to an alternate dimension with such wonky gravity that they won't be able to return.

Requirement: After doing class change, access the "window" in Flying Fortress 3F. Either turn your display upside down or use operating system features to flip the display. Exit the Flying Fortress without using Teleport or Exit. The Black Wizard must survive the trip.

Unlocks: (b)Warp

This was... about as hilarious as I expected. Since I'm playing on PC, I changed my monitor settings to be upside down. This didn't rotate my stream, so I had to set that up separately.

It wasn't too hard to get used to in terms of controls, but conceptually I wasn't used to it. I kept just laughing at how silly it was. The fights were easy, too, and I stuck around long enough to beat several Spirit Nagas for another quest that I didn't end up finishing. I was kind of hoping to run into WarMech, but that didn't happen.

Title: Mechanical Analysis

Author: nesplayer (2025)

Requirement: Talk to the 3 robots in Mirage Tower and each of the two banks of computers in the Flying Fortress.

Unlocks: (a)Diamond Shield

I had gradually been doing these things during the last few quests, and after exiting Dimension V I quickly re-entered the Mirage Tower to talk to the B1 robot that I had skipped.

Title: The Shield of Perseus

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Perseus has apparently grown old and taken up residence as one of the sages in Crescent Lake. He can allow you to use the Aegis Shield, but only after a worthiness of its gifts has been shown.

Requirement: Defeat 3 Medusas or Earth Medusas using the (b)Break spell. If a character with (b)Break or a character who can use the Aegis Shield are slain or petrified, start the counter back at 0. After beating 3, report to the Circle of Sages.

Unlocks: (a)Aegis Shield

I had tried to do this in the prior session, and even marked this complete, but it turns out I didn't since Cecil had been petrified. Well, I petrified some Earth Medusae earlier - and just lacked the spell charges to finish because I used Blizzaga so much during the Fork Tower.

When I returned to talk to the final robot, I ran into another group of Medusae. Vivi used Break, and neither Vivi nor Cecil were petrified or dead. So it's actually complete!

At this point, I was seriously considering whether to rush the endgame or not! There really were not that many quests remaining. I decided I ought to do some shopping, which resulted in me fully filling out everyone's spell lists.

There was one more quest I thought would benefit me that I could get done nice and easily.

Title: Mass Healing

Author: nesplayer & beege_man (2025)

Story: There has to be a more efficient way to heal...

Requirement: Get hit by a dragon's elemental breath weapon, then have a single character use a Potion on all four heroes while the rest of the party does nothing. Then win the fight.

Unlocks: (a)Healing Helm

I feel like I've been breathed on by White Dragons a lot in this playthrough. It didn't take long to run into one in the Cavern of Ice, and then the quest was easy from there.

Okay... on to the game's final area!

This wasn't quite the end of our questing regardless. There was nothing too unusual at the beginning. We got to encounter Jimera/Rhyos and Purple Worms for the first time. Phantom was easy, but I was a little surprised by the treasures he was guarding.

Title: Mass Harming

Author: beege_man (2025)

Story: There has to be a more efficient way to harm...

Requirement: Encounter a group of at least two Dragon Zombies. Defeat them without using regular attacks, spellcasting items, or any magic spell other than Dia.

Unlocks: (w)Diaja

This was actually really easy. We were absolutely not going to be buying Diaja, but I guess it's nice to be done another quest.

Title: Proof of Worthiness

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: Legend has it that, at some point in the past, a weapon of great power existed that could be wielded by anybody who could prove themselves worthy to wield it. Prove yourself worthy, and you might be its next wielder.

Requirement: Defeat at least 120 of the 128 monsters in the game (note that second version fiends count as unique from first version).

Unlocks: (e)Masamune

While I didn't actually grab the Masamune yet, I quickly perused the bestiary before Lich and realized the only enemies I hadn't met yet were WarMech, Iron Golem, and the five remaining bosses. I was already done this!

Proceeding through the final dungeon, we encountered Lich II. I was sort of surprised at his defenses.

Also, unfortunately, he landed a Warp spell on Cecil early in the fight. I tried to avoid using many resources, figuring he probably only had a couple hundred hit points, like the original. This made it take longer than I'd normally like... but, hey, he didn't use Flare!

Later, I checked Lich II's status in the bestiary, and was surprised even further.

I used Cecil's death as an opportunity to try to unlock Protect Cloaks by saving his life with a last-minute heal, but in the course of this I just utterly wasted about 5 or 6 of Lenna's level 5 white magic charges casting Life on him repeatedly. It did not pay off. We also grabbed a Protect Cloak in this interval, but we couldn't use it.

I ramped up how seriously I was going to take Marilith; I started the fight with Cecil and Locke each using the Defender twice and Giant's Gloves twice. After that we just used standard violence and it didn't feel too dangerous.

Here is how Marilith II's stats appear in the bestiary:

We did similar with Kraken, although I realized I could also make use of Haste. Like with Lich II, I was surprised at his defenses, as he was only taking a few hundred damage from most of my melee barrages even after the buffs. Perhaps I didn't stack them enough? We won regardless.

Here are Kraken II's stats from the bestiary:

When I went down the stairs, I made a beeline for the Masamune.

I decided to put it on Cecil; it really may have been stronger on Locke, but I didn't think about it too hard. It made a difference! Cecil's damage against Tiamat II was radically higher, and Tiamat II went down pretty quickly.

It is somewhat surprising that this fight seemed maybe the easiest given Tiamat II's enormous HP glow-up. Check out these stats:

Yikes! Well, that did leave me feeling prepared for the final boss.
In the NES version, you actually talk to Garland multiple times, so I thought I'd have another chance to heal up when I interacted with him. I wasn't in bad shape though, so it wasn't a big issue.

As you might expect, I started with buffs! I through up tons of Defender/Ruse effects, stacked some offensive buffs on Cecil and Locke, and even put NulAll on Cecil so he would avoid earth- and time-based attacks.

This didn't go amazingly well at first, as Chaos' physical attacks were doing around 300 damage before he used Haste on himself. He actually killed Cecil once in the early going. I had to think about whether I was going to let Lenna revive him in battle or not, because in a few respects I've tried to keep the gameplay close to the original version's features - for example, ignoring the new consumable items. But I said something like, "I guess I'll accept that this is the game I'm playing" and revived Cecil and buffed him up a second time.

Lenna used a few Protera casts when healing wasn't needed, which I thought might soften the nasty physical attacks. I occasionally had Vivi use Flare, but that was only doing ~450 damage so I mostly decided he was better off using healing itemcasts. Both Cecil and Locke were doing well over a thousand damage with buffed physical attacks. It made me think this game might be quite hard with a pure mage party.

Oh, we still had one more quest we could do!

Title: The Ultimate Trophy

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: What better reward could there be for defeating the final boss than a shiny, new pair of Iron Nunchuks?

Requirement: Defeat Chaos ;)

Unlocks: (e)Iron Nunchaku

What a wonderful trophy it is!
I was wondering about Chaos' actual buffs in this version. It is clear they were there, but I wasn't counting my damage numbers. It turns out the bestiary offers no help with this:

So, how about this playthrough? It was fun! It was actually like, very fun. It had very few points of actual challenge though. Still, if I'm a person who says I like variant playthroughs and constraints to experience familiar games in new ways, this delivered to an incredible extent. I'd like to extend a big thanks to the GameFAQs Final Fantasy board of past and present for all of the side quests.

Which ones did I not manage to get to?

Bringer of Fear was just too hard to count, even though I bet I finished it by accident. If the prize - the Fear spell - were better I might have cared more.
Protect the Weak is one that I may have done incidentally and not realized it or recorded it. Toward the end, I made a conscious effort to get it done a few times and it just really didn't work out. The prize was Protect Cloak.
Sight Unseeing was added right at the end, and while I love the idea, I wanted to get things finished that night when I played and I had no idea how long it would take. The prize was Invisira/INV2, which is actually really good (certainly better than Stona). If someone really wanted me to do it, I could still try.
Witness the Cure was added at the end. It seems that they swapped the Rakshasa/Catman's spell list so they use Curaja instead of Cure, so it may actually be impossible exactly as written. The prize was Curaga.
The Time Mage Sequence, it turns out, is impossible in Pixel Remaster even though it can be done in all prior versions. This is because the Evil Eye can only be found in the Cavern of Ice once. Too bad. The prize was the Stop spell, which is very unimportant.
High Wizardry was just casting a whole bunch of black magic spells. The prize was the Wizard Staff, which really doesn't matter at all. It wouldn't be hard at all to finish, just a bit time consuming and I'm unlikely to make use of its reward.
White Robe at the Bazaar is a weird one. I beat all of the required Spirit Nagas and Chimera, and just needed to defeat 5 more Crocodiles... but with their general rarity heightened by the changes to the mapping of encounters for river enemies, it was going to become a hassle. The White Robe is a good item, but Lenna was using the Diamond Bracelet at the end anyway, so it didn't matter too much.
Diamond Legacy is a relatively recent quest where part of it was quite specific about visiting the lake above the waterfall. That is impossible in Pixel Remaster, so it's marked abandoned. The prize was intended to be Diamond Gloves, which are more-or-less never useful.
Finally, Hard to Forge Adamant was my ticket to Excalibur! The only part I was missing was WarMech. As I said toward the end, as much as I would've liked to fight WarMech - and I did spend some time looking - I didn't want to go all in on that because it could've been 5 minutes or it could've been an hour.

It's hard to say which quests were "good" and "bad". Quests of the style, "go to place and kill [x]" or "kill [n] of [x]" were absolutely the most boring, but that doesn't make them bad. The solo quests were interesting, but cumbersome to set up. I liked the idea of quests that forced different party members into the lead. I am just glad they were somewhat varied. As stated above, it was fun overall.

It's also worth a note that this was my first playthrough on the Pixel Remaster version of this game. It's strange what they did for this release. It's very, very inauthentic to the original versions... but it's a heck of a lot better than Dawn of Souls in terms of difficulty and balance. I do like this version, but I think Final Fantasy Origins remains the version of Final Fantasy I'd recommend to someone who wants an authentic experience but with better visuals and a touch of QoL.

The team was fine, and certainly the best makeup with the nature of this "challenge". I played almost the entire game with 0.5x experience and still had levels well beyond what any casual player would need to beat the game. It was bound to happen given the number of extra trips and enemies I had to beat for quests, so I can't really comment on the changes to the experience curve.

Anyway... this was fun!

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part VI

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:07:14 GMT

Well... I didn't finish yet. This was played on August 31, 2025.

The first thing I wanted to do was beat Frost Gigases to enable Thor's Hammer. I expected them to be easy to find around Gaia, but it turns out that wasn't the case. I ran into some other interesting things, though.

I gave up on this after a bit and decided I'd be better off doing it in the Cavern of Ice. While I was there, I encountered some Dark Wizards and realized I could do a different quest while I waited for the Frost Gigases to show up.
Here are the things I did, mostly in the order that they happened:

Title: Magnetic Elf Battle

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: From another universe (or timeline or something), the party's fighter recalls having to travel through a cave with a strong magnetic field such that they had to rely on wooden, leather, cloth, and crystalline goods in order to face a corrupt elf. An ally's magic aided the fighter in overcoming this struggle and use of a magician's weapon is what the party has to gain.

Requirement: Defeat at least one Dark Wizard, Dark Fighter or Astos. From the time you enter the dungeon where you are searching for this quarry until you kill it, you must use no metallic equipment.

Unlocks: (e)Mage's Staff

For this Final Fantasy IV-based quest, we took off a bunch of our armor, even though the magnetism of equipment is somewhat ill-defined. For example: is a Diamond Helm metallic? I'd say I mostly erred on the side of caution. For weapons, we had Staff on three characters and Power Staff on the fourth.

Title: The God of Thunder

Author: Linguar82 (2019)

Story: Lukahn has heard of an artifact that holds the power of an ancient god within. But in order to tap into that power, the wielder must prove themselves worthy in the eyes of the god for whom it is named after.

Requirement: Defeat 10 Frost Gigases by only damaging them with Thunder family spells and physical attacks with a hammer, or making them run away.

Unlocks: (e)Thor's Hammer

It took quite a while to get these ten Frost Gigases done, getting me into roughly the 55-minute mark of my gameplay this day. But we did!

I found the idea of the ninja with the giant, metallic hammer amusing.
Now, with Gauntlets, Mage's Staff, and Thor's Hammer, I have three potent spellcasting items! This makes a big difference to how we fight random battles against large numbers of weak enemies, and generally saves us a lot of spell usage. Or, well, that would be true except that I don't actually own Thor's Hammer yet. Let's buzz over to the Mirage Tower and get it.

I could finally unequip the Mythril Hammers that most of the team had been using for this, but I cautiously kept Mythril Axes on Cecil and Locke most of the time because of a quest involving Vampire Lords. We looted all of the Mirage Tower's chests, but there was nothing we could actually make real use of until the 2nd floor, where we finally retrieved the Sun Blade, Thor's Hammer, and the Dragon Mail.

I didn't end up finding any Vampire Lords, although I did encounter a random Blue Dragon.

This was exciting, but there wasn't really a practical way to have it contribute to quest completion at the moment. I left soon after and decided to do the Sunken Shrine. It was very easy, and the only significant treasure we hadn't already got here was the Giant's Gloves / Power Gauntlet. I beat some Water Elementals using only elemental attacks, and got to Kraken.

Kraken isn't a very hard fight, except when he targets an un-buffed mage and does 300+ damage with an 8-hit physical attack. We took some steps to prevent that, gently buffed Locke and Cecil, and then beat him.

Title: Cagnazzo's Final Gambit

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), after having faced the archfiend of water, the party's fighter was once saved by two children who turned themselves to stone. Though the fighter and his allies had the ability to magically teleport away, it was their decision to walk out that put the children in danger. Being in a similar position may somehow remind the fighter, allowing him to tell the tale to his magical allies to inspire them.

Requirement: After class change, visit the Altar of Water and exit the Sunken Shrine by walking to the submarine thingy. Characters who can cast (w)Stona or (b)Break must not be killed or petrified during this trip.

Unlocks: (w)Stona, (b)Break

This is another Final Fantasy IV reference. All this quest really entails is walking backwards after beating Kraken instead of warping out. It's also important that my wizards don't die during the trip, requiring some caution. This was no real problem. Amazingly, I never encountered Ghosts on this entire trip - they would normally be the biggest scare in the Sunken Shrine for this sort of thing.

This part got strange; I had beaten three Water Elementals with elemental attacks earlier, and this was important for a quest where I needed to fight them as well as Air Elementals without resting. Thus, I was trying to get by using very few spells for a long time. Since I knew I wanted to fight Air Elementals, that meant going into the Flying Fortress. Going into the Flying Fortress meant fighting the game's only fixed Blue Dragon. Thus, I wanted to fight a Green Dragon in the Waterfall Cavern to do the quest involving fighting the different elemental dragons... while also conserving spell charges. It was sort of a strange cascade effect.

Title: Diamond Ore

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Did you know that the Waterfall Cavern was once used as a diamond mine? Apparently the rare Green Dragons that live there still hoard some of the diamonds. The Green Dragons are hesitant to show themselves while the Mummy Lords are present.

Requirement: In one trip to the Waterfall Cavern, defeat at least one Mummy Lord and then encounter at least one Green Dragon.

Unlocks: (a)Diamond Armor

I thought I'd need to get to the forced encounter at the end to fight a Mummy Lord, but I encountered one randomly almost right away. Thus, I just needed to beat a Green Dragon. They are quite rare here! But eventually, I got one.

Before heading back into Mirage Tower, I would need to fight both a Red Dragon (in Mount Gulg) and a White Dragon (in the Cavern of Ice). These were substantial detours but they didn't really take long. I did buy some potions but I was careful to avoid resting and fleeing. On the way to the Red Dragon, I ran into an Ogre Mage, and I made sure it got to buff itself before I clobbered it.

Then, in fairly short order, we did the Red Dragon and the White Dragon.

Title: Ultimate Protection

Author: Zzonkmiles (2019)

Story: There exists a special piece of equipment that can protect its bearer from all elements. But in order to prove that one is worthy enough to equip this, a trial is required.

Requirement: Without running away and without resting (inn/sleeping bag/tent/cabin/house), defeat at least one of each of the following enemies: White Dragon, Red Dragon, Green Dragon, and Blue Dragon. Additionally, the party must sustain damage from Icestorm, Blaze, Poison Gas, and Thunderbolt from the four dragons they kill.

Unlocks: (a)Ribbon

Before even getting to the cloaked figure acting as the fixed Blue Dragon fight, I once again encountered a random Blue Dragon on the 2nd floor of Mirage Tower. We got hit with Thunderbolt and earned our Ribbons!

Amazing! This was a quest that required some serious setup and care, even if my team is strong enough to stomp these dungeons now. It's one of a few that I thought I might just leave by the wayside, but I'm quite glad it happened.

Title: ~~The Shield of Perseus~~ (not actually done)

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

I'm mentioning this here although the final check-in doesn't happen until just after I leave this area, just because this is the timeframe when this quest was being completed... and in fact, a lot of the quests I do here require returning to a town to talk to someone. I hadn't really planned it, but I ran into quite a few Medusas here and thought I could get it done.

Although Cecil briefly had to be a statue, Vivi completed the core criteria for this quest in one battle...

...waitasecond.

Huh. I think I thought Vivi was the one who had to not be petrified! Okay, I'll have to consider this one not-yet-complete. The good thing, I suppose, is that I hadn't actually used the Aegis Shield in battle yet.

Title: Masters of Defense

Author: FlamingXP & FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: The Defender sword is a semi-intelligent magical weapon spoken of in legend as being able to provide its wielder with a potent defensive spell. It refuses to be held by anyone who hasn't observed this spell and also shown understanding that it can also be overcome.

Requirement: In separate battles with an Ogre Mage and a Spirit Naga, allow this enemy to cast Blink at least twice, and then defeat it using only physical attacks. A character that can equip the Defender must survive these battles for them to count.

Unlocks: (e) Defender

Remember when I was last in the volcano, and I let an Ogre Mage use Blink a couple of times? Well, I did that here with my first Spirit Naga.

Before getting anything else big done, there was a lot of treasure, including the adamantite. We also got our third Ribbon, which Locke would wear.

Not long after that, I ran into three Vampire Lords - our first.

Title: The Annointed Axe

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: It's possible to endow an axe with holy power by using it to overcome a great evil.

Requirement: Defeat a Vampire Lord in the Mirage Tower using only damage caused by attacks with axes. Sell the axe that deals the killing blow.

Unlocks: (e) Light Axe

Again, we have to head back to a town to sell the Mythril Axe, but Cecil did this nicely.

Title: Blue Magic: Death Force

Author: FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: Supposedly there exists a blue magic that allows its caster to resist the power of death! You'll need to observe an enemy setting up a barrier and resisting these magics to understand.

Requirement: Observe an enemy casting (w)NulShock, (w)NulFire, (w)NulFrost, (w)NulDeath or (w)NulAll. Cast (b)Death or (b)Kill on the monster and ensure it survives. Win the battle without any characters who can learn (w)NulDeath ever having any negative status effects.

Unlocks: (w)NulDeath

We sat in this fight for a while waiting for the Vampire Lords to (maybe ineffectively?) cast NulBlaze on themselves.

We did exactly as the quest says! The Death spell just doesn't animate or anything so it wasn't very anticlimactic.

Title: Undead Are Uninvited II

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: While in Cornelia, the party's white mage happened to bump into Krylos again. Krylos still hates the undead. Just talking with the man for a few moments reinvigorated the desire to destroy the undead within our white mage.

Requirement: Complete Undead are Uninvited. Kill 30 undead including a Dragon Zombie and a Vampire Lord. Stand in the woods near Cornelia and say out loud, "Thanks Krylos for hating the undead so much." Express your own disdain/loathing for the undead out loud. Imagine the world without the undead and how pleasant that would be.

Unlocks: (w)Diaga

A Vampire Lord was also the last missing piece of this puzzle... although like many of these other quests, I couldn't shout about the undead in a forest until after leaving.

Title: Blue Magic: Mighty Guard

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: A technique mastered by blue mages over the ages is one that massively bolsters the caster's defense. Often, enemies powerful enough to use this are quite rare, but once you've seen it cast you'll be able to use this powerful ability for yourself.

Requirement: Observe an enemy casting (w)NulAll. Win the battle without any characters who can learn (w)NulAll having any negative status effects.

Unlocks: (w)NulAll

Again, pretty quickly after those Vampire Lords I encountered a Dark Fighter. First, he cast Mighty Guard, er, NulAll... but I stuck around and let him just keep casting spells.

Title: Blue Magic: White Wind

Author: FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: White wind is a well-known blue magic ability that allows the caster to heal themself and their allies. (Often, it's only able to be used in battle!)

Requirement: Observe an enemy casting (w)Healara. Win the battle without any characters who can learn (w)Healara having any negative status effects.

Unlocks: (w)Healara

Because after a while he cast White Wind, er, Healara!

Title: Gotta Go Fast!

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Later in the journey, the party was able to befriend a hedgehog being bullied by Goblins in the forest. They learned that this hedgehog had a gift of immense speed that was partly limited by a lack of powerful emeralds that had been co-opted for use by some ancient Lefeinian who created robots with them.

Requirement: After obtaining the airship, defeat a group of 5 Goblins in a forest. Then, defeat at least 3 Guardians and 3 Soldiers.

Unlocks: (b)Haste

We had gradually been beating Soldiers and got this done almost immediately after, too. It was just a fight or two after the Dark Fighter. I had done the 5 Goblin encounter between the Green Dragon and Red Dragon in this play session to get this started.

Title: Advanced Studies in Elemental Physics

Author: KingRamz (2019)

Story: Jeff the Sage (you know, the one standing right next to Lukahn. Wow, do you really not remember him? Savage.) has been impressed by the way you handle yourself in battle. But if you want to unleash the true power of the elements, you must demonstrate that you know how to use it. Speak to Jeff while all of your training is fresh in your mind, and he will know you are ready.

Requirement: Without resting (inn/sleeping bag/tent/cabin/house), defeat 3 Water Elementals and 3 Air Elementals by damaging them only with fire, ice or lightning elemental attacks, and then return to Crescent Lake and talk to Jeff. (Elemental weapons and spells cast from items are ok.)

Unlocks: (b)Thundaga, (b)Blizzaga

Again, immediately after the fight with the previous, singular Soldier, we got an encounter with four Air Elementals. I was really careful to just use elemental attacks (including Ice Brands) here.

That's it! This is why we hadn't rested in so long. The team was actually doing quite well though. We weren't done yet.
Not long after this fight, I noticed the text for The Qake Is a Lie! and realized I could back out of the Flying Fortress and still do that quest, which sounded pretty easy. I may as well!

Title: The Qake is a Lie!

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: For some reason the ancient robotic guards in the Flying Fortress seem to have taken up taunting the humans who pass through, and they are obsessed with sweet edibles. Unfortunately you'll never get any qake until after you escape.

Requirement: Without using any restorative items from the time you enter the Flying Fortress, defeat at least one group of robotic enemies (Guardian, Soldier or WarMech). Leave without using (b)Teleport or (w)Exit.

Unlocks: (b)Quake

It took a minor backtrack but really wasn't hard!

Many of the restrictions like healing or items or using elemental weapons were listed now and we got to more freely enjoy our new spoils.

I guess the Katana has been renamed in this version. I had forgotten that they did that.
As I approached Tiamat, I thought it might be fun to fight WarMech. It doesn't do too much for me, other than fill the bestiary and make a bit of progress toward enabling Excalibur. I dawdled for a while waiting for it to happen, but despite all the other rather rare fights I've seen, it didn't. So I fought Tiamat!

We didn't really need any defensive help, but Lenna used Protera anyway. Cecil and Locke buffed. After a while, Vivi tried using Break and Scourge to go for the instant kill, but it didn't work.

We checked in with a lot of people, like Jeff, to finalize many of the quests noted above.

This also allowed one more quest!

Title: Synthesizing a Black Robe

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), the party's black mage was able to have a fine protective garment crafted by the dwarves in exchange for the necessary supplies. Those supples included a protective armlet, and an earth-empowered robe. As no earth-empowered robes exist in this world, the black mage would need to improvise to have appreciable results.

Requirement: You must have access to a hammer and already earned some means of applying earth resistance (probably NulDeath or NulAll). Bring a Clothes and a Protect Ring to the dwarven blacksmith and drop these when you speak with him.

Unlocks: (a)Black Robe

We've got a hammer and NulDeath so all we needed was to squander a Clothes and a Protect Ring.

This is great! There are actually relatively few quests remaining... and some, like the quest for Diamond Gloves, are impossible... and others, like the quest for the Fear spell, are pointless. There are just a few left that are worth doing but I sure hope we'll finish next time I play.

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part V

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:40:44 GMT

I played again on August 19th. I felt like I got quite a few quests done in a relatively short play session, and also made some game progress.

Although I was set up from the end of the previous session to fight lots of Weretigers/MANCATs, I did something else entirely right away. I started by walking through lava to get the entire team down to pitiful amounts of HP again and then I prepared to have my ninja, Locke, solo the Mount Gulg.

This would check off a few boxes, but the actual completion order was sort of like this:

Title: The One Who Kills the Ogre Will Be Named Champion

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: You are the best and brightest in all the land. Today one of you will be named champion. That champion shall have the privilege to go forth and rescue the lovely Princess Sara from the Temple of Fiends. If for any reason the winner is unsuccessful, the first runner-up will take his place and so on and so forth. Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make! And if Sara has already been rescued, you shall be allowed to take credit for it, and take one prize that makes much more sense than a bridge. Oh! What is that? It's hideous! Knights, new plan!

Requirement: With any solo character, win a battle that includes a Ogre Chief and a Hyenadon without them running away. If a qualifying battle is attempted and failed, your next attempt must be with a different solo character. After winning, report to the king in Cornelia.

Unlocks: (a)Mythril Helm

This whole thing was a gigantic Shrek reference, right down to the helmet reward. Locke happened to run into a gigantic squad of Hyenadons with an Ogre Chief and Ogre Mage, which met the criteria for this challenge. He wiped most of them by using two Blizzaras.

This, by the way, is a rather extreme example of an encounter that could never exist on the NES; these enemies are all considered "large" so the most of these enemies who could ever congregate together in older versions of Final Fantasy was four! Here, we got two ogres and seven donkeys!
Although the check-in with the king in Cornelia happened later, I thought that I should tell Locke's story in something like chronological order, so I put it here. I spoke to the king after finishing up in Mount Gulg.

Title: Falconmaster

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: The Falchion was named for an expert in falconry. To use it, you need to demonstrate your mastery over birds.

Requirement: Defeat a group with at least 5 Cockatrices and/or Pyrolisks.

Unlocks: (e)Falchion

I happened to encounter a lot of Pyrolisks on Locke's trip through the volcano!

This was at least the fourth I encountered, and the second that included this many birds. Each time, of course, my heart sank a bit, anticipating getting Squinted out of existence... but it didn't happen. I ran from the first group of 5 birdies, but realized I could take advantage of the situation with the same amount of risk when I encountered this second group. Done.
I have... zero intent to actually use a Falchion.

Title: The Phoenix Cave

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), the party's thief was known to be seeking a powerful treasure said to have the ability to restore life. Ultimately, he pulled off the amazing feat of travelling through a trap- and lava-filled dungeon to find the treasure only to find that it did not carry the same kind of power that legends suggested it would. However, he did find a powerful weapon - the Valiant Knife - during this trip.

Requirement: Solo Mount Gulg with a thief or ninja. You must enter Mount Gulg with the other characters dead, exit through the teleport square behind the orb, and open at least one treasure chest along the way (even if it's empty).

Unlocks: (e)Katana

This is why Locke was alone! It was actually quite easy, even despite doing other non-trivial quests along the way. Locke having an Ice Shield certainly helped. I made sure he inspected a chest during this trip.

Title: What Are You Doing?!

Author: beege_man (2019)

Story: Everyone gets a little confused sometimes...

Requirement: If you are playing with a controller, you must complete a trip from an Inn to an elemental altar while playing with the controller upside down. If not using a controller, complete said trip by only attacking physically and always picking a random target for your attack.

Unlocks: (b)Confuse

Did I mention that I did this entire solo trip with the controller upside down? Hahah.
It really wasn't that bad! I would say I sort of mostly got used to it, and I think the Pixel Remaster's diagonal movement made some of the trickier movement simpler, too. In the video posted above, you'll notice I held the controller up for most of the trip to make it apparent.

Four non-trivial quests done in one trip! The rewards aren't really a big deal at the moment, but I'll be thankful for the Katana later, for sure. This solo stuff was quick to set up and the result was encouraging, so I dove back into the lava to swap my solo character to Lenna. It ended up being a close call when she went to step out of the volcano!

Believe it or not, she survived this!
Our next stop was the Cavern of Earth. There were two side quests with heavily overlapping requirements that I could get done under these circumstances. There were times when it didn't seem like it would be a cakewalk.

She pulled through regardless! Against small undead squads she mostly used Dia instead of running.

Title: The Quest for Life

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: Legends tell of the mythical fountain that can restore life. Turns out it's in the Cavern of Earth! Who knew? However, it is completely hidden to those without a pure heart.

Requirement: With a solo white mage (all others dead or stoned), enter the Cavern of Earth and exit out the portal behind the altar.

Unlocks: (w)Full-Life

Title: The Test of Exiting

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Once you have proven your ability to exit a dangerous dungeon, mastering a magic that facilitates this must be easy, right?

Requirement: You must solo a multi-level dungeon with a "rear exit" with each character capable of learning (w)Exit. This could include any of the Cavern of Earth, Mount Gulg, Cavern of Ice, Citadel of Trials, Sunken Shrine, or Mirage Tower/Flying Fortress.

Unlocks: (w)Exit

Honestly, these quests are nearly identical, except for the fact that one more directly specifies which dungeon to do. It only made sense to me to do them at the same time. The reason this happened at all, to be clear, is because these were written in different years/threads.

Title: White Mage's Adventure

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: Our resident white mage wants to prove their worth as a combatant and not just a healer. As such, they venture off alone to prove their skill in battle. Upon doing so, they weary of combat and brings the others back a weapon so they can fight more effectively.

Requirement: Win one battle in the (former) PNEoP with only the party's white mage alive. They must enter the battle alone and win.

Unlocks: (e)Broadsword

This quest was easy to check off since Lenna was wandering around by herself anyway. It's also kind of useless at this point. Heck, it was kind of useless ages ago! It might be nice to swap the Broadsword with the Mythril Sword. Oh well. Lenna hammered a few Tarantulas to finish the quest.

Title: White Mage's Compassion

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), the party's white mage was a hero renowned for their kindness. They had a deep connection with animals, and dragons in particular. An independent quest to focus on compassion while connecting with dragonkin may help awaken their latent power.

Requirement: With a solo white mage, speak to every dragon in the Cardia Islands (omitting Bahamut if you like) between saves. You may not deal damage to any monster during this quest.

Unlocks: (w)Curaja

This was also really easy while Lenna was alone. In fact, as we crossed Cardia, I think we only ran into one encounter.

It turns out there are 11 dragons in the Cardia Isles not including Bahamut.

I wanted to get some spells, like Healaga and/or Curaja, so after healing the rest of the team, I decided to head to Onrac for the first time.

I then got sucked into going through the upper levels of the Sunken Shrine and getting the Slab/Rosetta Stone.

Title: Kope's Keen Peepers

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: As you know, Kope of Onrac has a real knack for spotting distant objects. He's been looking out into the sea east of Onrac recently, and he thought he saw something really valuable, but there were too many damn fish in the way for him to tell what it was and exactly where it was located. Control the ocean populations and maybe he can help you out.

Requirement: After speaking to Kope for the first time, defeat 20 Sharks or White Sharks within the Sunken Shrine, and then speak to Kope again.

Unlocks: (a)Diamond Armlet

Along the way, I defeated over 20 sharks just incidentally. Very nice. The Diamond Armlet went on Locke at first.

I got the Rosetta Stone and did my Duolingo.

Although I didn't have a really plan to rush the Mirage Tower, I know there are a lot of goodies and a lot of quests there, so I went to Lefein to claim the Chime.

While I was here, I also got Full-Life! I can't actually unlock Flare/NUKE until after I enter the Mirage Tower, so this trip was necessary regardless. Here's what our mages' spell lists look like at the moment:

Next, I went to the Waterfall. Part of what I wanted to do here was Wyldstar's recently-added Diamond Legacy quest... but I found that, in this version, you can't canoe north of the Waterfall. That quest might not be possible... although we'll see, as I haven't investigated yet whether there might be a tiny airship landing spot.

In the Waterfall Cavern, I spoke to bats. I was sort of hoping to encounter a Green Dragon for a couple of quests, but that didn't happen. Cecil and Locke both got squinted in our first battle, so I was grateful to have just learned Full-Life for Lenna. The spiked square presented no real difficulty.

The Waterfall Cavern has two amazing treasures at the end and we can't use them yet.

Title: Decked Out in Mythril

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Once you're dripping with mythril, you might be able to attract a golem that provides enough extra mythril ore to craft a suit of armor from it.

Requirement: Equip one character with a Mythril Shield, Mythril Helm, Mythril Gloves, and any weapon made of mythril, then defeat a Clay Golem.

Unlocks: (a)Mythril Mail

I realized when I encountered Clay Golems in the Waterfall Cavern that I now had the required equipment unlocked for this quest. The Mythril Armor is never really going to be an asset, but I finished it anyway.

Title: I'm Batman

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: Legends tell of a great hero who once donned a bat costume and fought against a really powerful villain named Bane. Prove yourself worthy of the hero's name and you can use the villain's sword. Retranslation may have ruined a fun joke here.

Requirement: Between the various dungeons, talk to at least 50 bats.

Unlocks: (e)Razer

By the end of the Waterfall Cavern, I still needed three more bats to total 50, so I wandered back to the Marsh Cave to finish up. FlamingXP had joined me and encouraged me to fight Hill Gigases for a few quests.

Title: Tanks, You're Welcome

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: The fighter is proving his worth as a tank, but he's not satisfied yet. His will to improve continues.

Requirement: Receive a hit from a Hill Gigas for exactly 1 damage.

Unlocks: (a)Knight's Armor

FlamingXP was on to something; this was super easy to check off in one trip into the Cavern of Earth's hall of giants. And since we were there...

Title: Rare Drop from Hill Gigases

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Let's be unoriginal!

Requirement: Defeat at least 32 Hill Gigases between saves.

Unlocks: (e)Great Sword

This was a bit annoying. The new format of the hall of giants meant that I had to re-spawn the cloaked figures by leaving and re-entering... although that's still faster than hoping for Hill Gigases in random encounters... probably. I didn't get any "naturally-occurring" Hill Gigases, so this was 8 dives into the Cavern of Earth. With auto-battle and whatnot this was a little under 10 minutes.

Title: The Spirit of Flame

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: As the party approaches the Flame Armor, they quickly realize that it has been possessed by an evil flame spirit. It can be purified by sprinkling the ashes of an evil wizard.

Requirement: After facing the Red Dragon square by the Flame Mail, defeat one Dark Wizard with the finishing attack being fire-elemental. Then return to the chest with the Flame Mail.

Unlocks: (a)Flame Mail

I went to the Ice Cave and put a Flame Sword on Cecil for the purpose of this quest. The Dark Wizards had really wrecked my day during my prior visit so it was nice to have the fight go my way. I purposefully used the Flame Sword for this in order to double dip on another quest, too. Oh, and I did a super fast jaunt into the volcano to clear this after leaving the Ice Cave, but not before checking off the next quest.

Title: Professional Jewelers

Author: Zzonkmiles (2019)

Story: Nobody likes having their life snuffed out of them cheaply. Eliminate that problem by donning the armor that renders such attacks harmless! But there is a catch. The goons that are holding this armor are the goons that best exploit those who don't have it.

Requirement: Defeat two separate groups of Dark Wizards in the Cavern of Ice in one trip without magic.

Unlocks: (a)Protect Ring

So in just two Dark Wizard fights, I did this! They really do seem to have very high absorb, but their HP is low enough that they didn't get a lot of attacks off.

Around this point, as usual, the stream dropped, so this session continues in a second, shorter video. Now I chose to go back to the Citadel of Trials area to start the Cat Army quest that FlamingXP really wanted done. Despite his interest in cats and him having written the quest, he left before it concluded.

Title: Weapons of the Cat Army

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: In the forests near the Citadel of Trials, the party comes across a lost tower surrounded by an army of... cats. The cats request the party's help dealing with... dogs. After dealing with the dogs, it's important to take care of any additional dogs that may have followed the group back to the tower.

Requirement: After achieving class change, encounter a Weretiger group in a forest and run away without killing any of them. Then, defeat a group of Winter Wolves. Then, encounter another Weretiger group in a forest and run away without killing any of them again. Then, defeat a group that includes Warg Wolves. Finally, encounter a Weretiger group in a forest and run away without killing any a third time.

Unlocks: (e)CatClaw

It did conclude! Here's a magnificent screenshot of the aftermath of my encounter with Winter Wolves:

And here's what happened to the Warg Wolves after I checked in with the Weretigers again.

They were very dead. It took a long time to encounter Weretigers again after this. I instead found some Barettas and they were very cruel to me.

I was once again grateful for my resurrection spells. Shortly after, I ran into Weretigers for a third time.

Title: The Long Way

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: The best way to master speed is to become aware of its significance.

Requirement: Travel from any town to the Citadel of Trials without using the ship, and without any characters who can learn (b)Slowra dying or being petrified.

Unlocks: (b)Slowra

Since I was in the area, I chose to finish the walk to the Citadel of Trials. Frankly, it wasn't as long or inconvenient as I remembered. Also, while I was there, I decided I should defeat some Medusas to finally make use of my Gauntlets.

Title: Blue Magic: Mind Blast

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Sorcerers stand out as an enemy that has a proclivity for a spell-like effect similar to paralysis-inducing magic.

Requirement: Observe an enemy using Mind Blast. Win the battle without any characters who can learn (b)Stun having any negative status effects.

Unlocks: (b)Stun

We got this by happenstance. I didn't recall Mindflayers showing up the 2nd floor of this place, but they did!

I got a bit lucky with who was affected by Mind Blast, but it worked out.

Title: The uh, other God of Thunder

Author: Linguar82 (2019)

Story: Lukahn has heard of an artifact that holds the power of an ancient god within. But in order to tap into that power, the bearer must prove themselves worthy in the eyes of the god for whom it is named after. He swears this one is different.

Requirement: Defeat 25 Medusas using only Thunder family spells or the Break spell.

Unlocks: (a)Gauntlets

It took ages to find enough Medusas for this to happen, but we got access to the Zeus Gauntlets! I don't have Thunder or Thundaga, so I exclusively used Thundara with both Locke and Vivi when opportunities presented themselves. This took two shots for Locke.

Title: Diamond Drip

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Diamonds are so luxurious and expensive! Nobody could wear a hat made of diamond without amassing a ton of treasure, enough to buy several expensive jeweled bracelets. Once you have that kind of drip you might think the bracelets are garbage.

Requirement: Sell 5 Ruby Armlets at the same time.

Unlocks: (a)Diamond Helm

The shopping was very exciting after the last few quests.

When I went to Gaia to grab Cat Claws, I also grabbed a few extra Ruby Armlets and then sold a batch of them to finish this.

We're very well geared up and set to do either the Sunken Shrine or the Mirage Tower! I could go either way.

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part IV

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:41:30 GMT

I did a bit more side questing on August 17th. This time, I was joined for most of the play session by FlamingXP, who is one of my kids and also the author of many of the newest quests. It didn't feel like I got that many quests done, really, but it was... productive.

The plan was to get through the Citadel of Trials (aka Castle of Ordeals) with only Cecil. I did have a couple of nasty deaths in the relatively early going, and ended up using the Pixel Remaster's quick saves.

The Nightmares wear beautiful blue robes.

Although we can't make use of most of the treasure here, we do qualify for the Ice Brand sword, which is a very nice upgrade before the Dragon Zombies. I actually encountered some random Dragon Zombies before the ones guarding the way out!

There were three quests I was trying to complete, including one that had Cecil wasting four turns at the start of the battle and one with Cecil wasting ten turns at the start of the battle. Let's just say the first one I got done is this:

Title: The Darkness Within

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), the party's fighter was a dark knight who overcame his trained power of darkness to become a paladin by going through an intense trial, culminating in facing the darkness within himself. Ultimately this allowed him to wield great powers of light.

Requirement: Defeat at least one Dragon Zombie in the Citadel of Trials with a solo fighter or knight. You must start the battle by taking four ineffective actions or actions that only affect your own character.

Unlocks: (e)Sun Blade

It became apparent pretty quickly that 10 turns wasn't happening! Even squandering four turns was pretty hard. Thankfully, the game's innate quicksaves were in play and I was able to roll through roughly 10 attempts pretty quickly. I tried variations of defending and using potions and eventually got it. This was actually pretty hard! Cecil doesn't have any mythril armor pieces, so he is taking more damage than a casual player might at this point. Any paralysis that landed would usually herald a losing attempt. However, after roughly ten minutes of attempts aided by autobattle and quicksaves, Cecil did it!

Next, I went and got my class change! Now most of the team was face-down with exciting new graphics.

FlamingXP encouraged me to buy a Bottle at this point, so I did that, too.

I thought some things Cecil or others might want to do soon might benefit from the knights' and ninjas' access to low-level magic, so I wandered from town to town buying up spells. I hadn't considered that Cecil and Locke won't have spell charges for a while. I wanted Cecil to get spell charges so I tried to grind for a bit. In the course of this, I noticed I could get this IKEA-themed quest done.

Title: You Feel Bad For That Lamp?

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Sarda is an old dude who lives alone in a cave. Despite his odd life situation, he has some of the finest furniture in the world. He has a bed, a fireplace, two tables, a chair, and lots of jars. Where does he get this all? Not Ikea. If it breaks, he's not sure how to replace it. We will need go around the world asking people, "Where did you buy that?". Sarda will go shopping, and y'know, you always come back with something extra.

Requirement: After getting Sarda's Rod, find a bed, a fireplace, a table, a wooden chair, and a jar. Finally, talk to Sarda again.

Unlocks: (w)Blindna

With the new shop interiors, it wasn't hard to find most of this furniture. We found the fireplace in Cornelia Castle.
Next, we stepped briefly into the Ice Cave to get this done:

Title: An Old Dragon and His Ore

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: There's a White Dragon named Fred who has collected lots of mythril over the years, even filling an entire room of the Cavern of Ice with mythril. Fred has a Dragon Zombie cousin named Zack. Fred is mad at Zack for stealing his precious mythril ores. If you can defeat Zack, Fred may be willing to share.

Requirement: After encountering a White Dragon, defeat a Dragon Zombie, and return to the Cavern of Ice.

Unlocks: (a)Mythril Gloves

Next, I wanted to do the thing where Cecil solos a dragon for ten turns. I thought the White Dragons in the Cavern of Ice would be the easiest candidate for this as well, and I wanted to be able to use his spells. This had a few problems: for one, I died while attempting to grind him two levels to gain some MP/spell charges. For another, this was stupid in the first place since knights can't use NulFrost. This was a misguided idea and eventually I gave up and just attempted this challenge near the entrance of the Cavern of Ice anyway.

Title: Blessing of the Dragons

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: There exists a powerful armor made out of dragon scales that can mitigate both physical and magical damage. Only by proving your ability to take a beating as well as dragons can will you ever be allowed to wear it.

Requirement: A character who can use Dragon Mail must enter a battle alone with at least one dragon in it and last ten rounds without being killed, then defeat the dragon. The character may not take any battle actions against the dragon or to buff for those ten rounds, but may heal himself.

Unlocks: (a)Dragon Mail

I had some stunlocks, but I was (legitimately) saving very frequently at the Cavern of Ice entrance anyway, basically after nearly every battle. When I eventually met a single White Dragon, I just had Cecil use a potion every turn for 10 turns and survived easily. I accidentally left auto-battle on while I took screenshots so it was actually quite a bit more than 10 turns.

FlamingXP encouraged me to do a Fashionista quest that required my team to use no equipment with an evade penalty greater than 2, so I went around and made sure I could equip the knight and ninja with lighter gear. We put that on pause for a little bit because I read the description for Intermediate Studies in Elemental Physics: I knew this would be easy to do at the start of the volcano, so I wanted to go to the bottom of the Cavern of Earth to fight Earth Elementals for that. Even before that, I realized there was a quest available that I was basically done that would make my life easier!

Title: Honoring Erdrick II

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: As the stories go, Erdrick adventured around his world and was able to purchase or procure more impressive items. Perhaps he can be further honored by offering up some of the stronger equipment that this hero once used. The stories say he once used a Flame Sword and carried an impressive Silver Shield.

Requirement: Having completed Honoring Erdrick, bring a Flame Sword and a Silver/Mythril Shield to Erdrick's grave in Elfheim. Carrying these, but not using them, is allowed at any time for the purpose of fulfilling this quest.

Unlocks: (e)Flame Sword, (a)Mythril Shield

This is one of a few quests that was re-numbered when the quests were compiled. Not only would we benefit from these shields, but Locke could start using the Flame Sword. We already had the gear, so completing this now was trivial! I went to grab a bit of mythril gear and Crescent Lake made me realize I had a lot of gaps in my magic list, so I quickly banged out this one:

Title: Appreciating... a Swamp?

Author: beege_man (2019)

Story: Elvish legends tell of a giant swamp east of Elfheim over the mountains. No one knows what lies in the swamp and due to its remote location blocked off by mountains, almost no one has set foot there in ages. Explore the swamp to see if you can find its secrets.

Requirement: Walk on every square of the swamp east of Elfheim.

Unlocks: (w)Protera

This is a very large swamp. I've truly never had a reason to walk through it, so good on beege_man for making this happen. It happens that I entered from the right-hand side and then gradually worked my way left, so the line between Crescent Lake-area enemies and Elfland-area enemies was pretty stark.

Now, the plan was to go through the Cavern of Earth and fight three Earth Elementals, and without resting, go to Mount Gulg and defeat three Fire Elementals. Doing this would unlock a few things, and set us up to wander through Mount Gulg anyway.

Title: Let's do the Time Warp Again

Author: beege_man (2025)

Story: You can learn basic teleportation spells through repeated observation of teleportation circles.

Requirement: Use the teleporter at the end of the Earth Cavern, Mount Gulg, Sunken Shrine or Flying Fortress a second time.

Unlocks: (b)Teleport

It took a very long time to encounter three Earth Elementals, and that was the biggest barrier to getting this done.

Title: Intermediate Studies in Elemental Physics

Author: KingRamz (2019)

Story: Jeff the Sage (you know, the one standing right next to Lukahn. Wow, do you really not remember him? Savage.) has been impressed by the way you handle yourself in battle. But if you want to unleash greater power of the elements, you must demonstrate that you know how to use it. Speak to Jeff while all of your training is fresh in your mind, and he will know you are ready.

Requirement: Without resting (inn/sleeping bag/tent/cabin/house), defeat 3 Earth Elementals and 3 Fire Elementals by damaging them only with fire, ice or lightning elemental attacks, and then return to Crescent Lake and talk to Jeff. (Elemental weapons and spells cast from items are ok.)

Unlocks: (b)Firaga

Once we got into Mount Gulg, the Fire Elementals basically wouldn't leave me alone! Within just a couple of battles I had beaten three of them and defeated them appropriately.

We went back to Jeff reasonably promptly to finish off this quest before delving deeper.

There was a bit of a shopping trip and we went back to the land of lava. I skipped the Mount Gulg B2 treasure.

Title: Giant Power

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Gauntlets of Ogre Power, Gloves of Giant Strength, Power Gauntlets... whatever they're called, to be able to find and utilize these magnificent creations you need to know what you're getting into, by observing the strength of giants firsthand.

Requirement: Defeat at least one of each of the following enemies: Ogre, Ogre Chief, Ogre Mage, Hill Gigas, Fire Gigas, Ice Gigas. Observe any of these creatures doing 90 or more damage at least once.

Unlocks: (a)Giant's Gloves

I had been keeping track of the giant enemies I'd beaten all along, but finally ran into a Fire Gigas here. I had also noted a 90+ damage hit from a Hill Gigas a while ago. Anyway, it's done!
After B2, I got most of the treasures, including a second Ice Brand sword that Locke could use.

At the bottom of the volcano, with my characters in good shape, I ran into a Red Dragon. There's a quest about enduring a Red Dragon's Blaze attack, so I tried that. I also tried to tie it into the quest to walk a lap in the lava, but I left my party too weak and actually did wipe once.

Although I did this successfully, I ended up un-completing it since my party died. We'll come back to this.

Title: Hyperthermastery

Author: FlamingXP & FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: To gain a shield of flame, you need to forge your spirit in the fires of a volcano!

Requirement: Go to Mount Gulg B5 (the lowest level) and do a full lap around the staircase without leaving the lava. Without accessing an out-of-battle menu, defeat a Red Dragon.

Unlocks: (a)Flame Shield

After loading my save, I immediately did a lap and used the Flame Armor chest Red Dragon to do this. The first time I did it, I had endured three Blaze attacks; it turns out the lap of the floor in lava did a lot less damage than I expected and this left my team much better able to survive the Red Dragon.

Title: To Hell and Back... and Back to Hell

Author: beege_man (2025)

Story: If you can weather the flames of hell, you can learn a spell that will help you mitigate their fury.

Requirement: Have a character who can cast Healaga survive Blaze from a Red Dragon or Tiamat 3 times in a single fight.

Unlocks: (w)Healaga

Now that I was able to do some out-of-battle healing without ruining another quest, I lingered hoping for a Red Dragon before Marilith. Healing afterward took my Potion stock down to 1! With this finished, I changed equipment such that nothing had a weight/evasion penalty over 2 and went to the boss.

I had a feeling that some of Marilith's vulnerabilities to status effects might've been modified in this version of the game... but it was spotty. Dark didn't work in one attempt, and Silence didn't work at all. Hold worked briefly and Slow worked well, and with NulBlaze we reduced her offense considerably.

Vivi used Temper on Locke and Cecil once each, and then they attacked. Lenna was still trying to get status spells to stick when I won.

Title: Fashionista Jeff

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Perhaps the only person in the world who knows fashion better than Arylon is Jeff. Just like Arylon, he knows how to reward someone who can fight while looking good.

Requirement: Defeat any version of Kary/Marilith, Kraken, Tiamat or WarMech while only wearing equipment each with an evade penalty of -2 or less, then talk to Jeff.

Unlocks: (a)Ruby Armlet

FlamingXP very much encouraged me to get this done. I even went up to Gaia promptly to buy all four of these!

I may have forgotten to speak to Jeff again. Only after making that purchase, I realized it was easy to get some other armor.

Title: Thirty Pieces of Silver, with Discount!

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: They say that the pink-clad pirate in Gaia once sold out his crew for thirty pieces of silver, and we can only imagine that smug bastard would do it again. Carrying 30 pieces of silver equipment could probably convince him to do just about anything. He could even steal some heat-resistant gear from the desert-dwelling caravan he's been dealing with! Also, there's a sale because 30 is excessive so it's 50% off.

Requirement: Visit the pink pirate in western Gaia carrying 15 silver or mythril equips of any kind, where duplicates are allowed. Drop all of them in his presence. This can be done over multiple trips.

Unlocks: (a)Ice Armor, (a)Ice Shield

Since dropping doesn't exist, I can't effectively waste as much money as was intended by this quest. Thus, instead of using very cheap Mythril Daggers, I used Mythril Helmets. I put the Flame Shield and Ice Armor on Cecil and the Ice Shield on Locke. Amid these trips to Gaia, I also got Oxyale and bought Vivi the Kill spell that I unlocked much earlier. He already has 1 level 8 spell charge.

I don't know what we'll do when we play next time! A lot of quests are in play, but it might also be nice to hastily open up the Mirage Tower since there are a few goodies inside that we can immediately make use of.

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part III

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:39:27 GMT

The side quest-a-thon continued on August 13th.
There were a few side quests added (some by GameFAQs folks, some by my kids) within the last week, by the way, all of which are documented in the as-of-now current topic on GameFAQs. With those, there are only six things in the whole game that have no means to unlock!: Diamond Shield, Healing Helm, Curaga/CUR3, Invisira/INV2, Diaja/HRM4, and Dispel/XFER. I'll stop myself and my kids from adding anything and hold out for a while for quests from other community members... although there's definitely some kind of opportunity to make the party walk around naked to unlock Invisira.

We were starting from Crescent Lake and our main goal to start was to do the entire Earth Cave. Right off the cuff, there was a situation where I must have not saved the game even though I had saved my quest progress. I only fully realized exactly what happened a little bit later when I didn't have my new Mythril Sword for Cecil and Mythril Hammer for Lenna. I didn't think it was worth trekking back to Crescent Lake at that point so I did the next part of the game without those upgrades. However, the quests I completed, such as Fashionista Arylon, will still be considered complete.

On the way to the Earth Cave (or whatever it's called in this version), I finally encountered the Ghast I needed for Double, Double, Toil & Trouble III. It was a bit of a silly battle, too, where everyone was stunned except for Lenna blowing all the undead away with Dia.

This version of the game treats spiked squares very differently... which is to say, they seem to not exist at all. Fixed encounters like the "hall of giants" are replaced by cloaked figures who initiate encounters, resulting in a much less dangerous/profitable experience there. The spiked squares that would be guarding chests are replaced, as we've already seen, by "monster-in-a-box". Part of what this means is that encounters with Earth Elementals and other enemies on spiked squares are much, much rarer - and less predictable.

Another thing I learned during this session: whether an encounter is escapable or not has changed. It's not associated with the encounter formation itself, but rather with the, um, circumstances? What this means is random Piscodemons or Ogre Mages can be escaped, where in the FF1 version they can't. As well, enemies that are monsters-in-a-box that are normally escapable spiked squares, like the Sphinxes, are not escapable. I found this out when I attempted to fail at running from Piscodemons for one of the side quests, but succeeded!

Title: IF FIRE FAILS, USE LIGHTNING

Author: FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: Elfheim's black magic vendor has refused to sell (b)Thundara, saying there's no market for the spell as long as (b)Fira is available. You'll need to prove that it can be an asset to change his mind.

Requirement: Cast (b)Fira on 8 different enemies without defeating them.

Unlocks: (b)Thundara

The Melmond area's Lesser Tigers were the seventh enemy to survive Fira, and an Earth Elemental guarding a chest was the eighth.

I got the Coral Sword and put it on Cecil, since I didn't have a Mythril Sword and he was still using a Battle Axe. It made a pretty good upgrade for now. I was surprised not to find any Ogre Mages on B3 at all; the cloaked figure was an Earth Elemental.

That basically brings us to the Vampire. This was an opportunity to complete a few quests!

Title: Learning to Lose Intelligence

Author: nesplayer & Jay_Shaw (2025)

Story: The party's Black Mage has learned of a way to cause his opponents to \"lose intelligence.\" However, to properly study this technique, he will need to observe his companions attempting something awfully dumb - what could work better than having everyone repeatedly try to flee from a situation they could never possibly hope to escape?

Requirement: Have all party members try to run (and fail) from an unrunnable battle twice, then win the battle.

Unlocks: (b)Slow

Knowing that finding unrunnable encounters is actually a little bit challenging, I decided to build it into this fight. I wasted the first two rounds, and accidentally left auto-battle on, wasting a third round.

Title: Undead Are Uninvited

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: While in Cornelia, the party's white mage happened to bump into a ranger by the name of Krylos. Krylos really, really... really hates the undead. Just talking with the man for a few moments stirred a similar desire to destroy the undead within our white mage.

Requirement: Kill 20 undead including a Mummy and a Vampire.

Unlocks: (w)Diara

We had well over 20 undead defeated for this quest - in fact, it was probably over 100. We fought our first Mummies on the first floor of the Earth Cave, and the Vampire finished this off. So, not only did we finish this quest, but we got the Star Ruby.

On the way out, I wandered through the "hall of giants", completing some quests.

Title: The Giant Loop

Author: gameenjoyer (2019)

Story: Legend has it that there is a wing in a cave somewhere that is populated by so many Hill Gigases that one cannot move without being attacked by them. Is anybody brave enough to try to traverse that entire area?

Requirement: Walk through the Hall of Giants in the Cavern of Earth, fighting every battle you encounter along the way. You may not run from any of them.

Unlocks: (e)Crosier

I am... very unlikely to make use of the Crosier/Iron Staff. It's one of those things that's so dumb that perhaps using the Crosier should, itself, be the objective of a quest.

Title: It's For More Than Cutting Trees

Author: hawkeyerules (2020)

Story: The party's fighter has been racking up the kills with his sword but he wanted to experiment with other weapons.

Requirement: Kill a 2 Hill Gigas 2 Lizard formation twice in the Cavern of Earth without dropping any party member to their knees and without healing in either battle.

Unlocks: (e)Mythril Axe

I decided for this one that I may as well count the 2 Hill Gigas 3 Lizard formations as well, since it was technically impossible on prior versions of the game and expressly harder. This is something that I considered with some reluctance, especially given how that one quest for the Thunder spell is phrased. But since the Hall of Giants works differently and I did my absolute best to clobber everything in it, I think the intent of this quest is fulfilled.

I went straight over to Sadda (who used to be called Sarda) instead of taking the time to go back to town to rest.

Before heading back into the Earth Cave, I went back to the Aldi Sea towns for some shopping, particularly because I wanted my newly unlocked Thundara and Diara spells. I also had never bought Temper and a few things were missing perhaps from my save debacle. Since I had met nearly every requirement of Double, Double, Toil and Trouble III, I actually wandered back over to the Marsh Cave to finish it up.

Title: Double, Double, Toil & Trouble III

Author: beege_man (2020)

Story: Matoya let slip the tale of a witch who set up shop just outside the ruined NW Castle. Apparently lots of people enter that castle, but few exit... be careful. After visiting the NW witch, she asks you to hunt around and in the Marsh Cave for some ingredients that can make an even more potent disabling spell.

Requirement: Visit the NW Castle, then kill 1 Green Slime, 1 Ghast, 1 Werewolf, then return to the NW Castle.

Unlocks: (b)Hold

Since I got some Ghasts around Melmond, I just needed the Green Slime. It didn't take too long, and I got this done!

Title: Double, Double, Toil & Trouble IV

Author: beege_man (2020)

Story: After finishing the previous collection, the NW witch was surprised to see you return. Well if you were able to get those ingredients, perhaps you can delve a bit deeper and get some even tougher ones for an even better spell?

Requirement: Complete Double Double Toil and Trouble III, then kill 1 Grey Ooze, 1 Scorpion, 1 Crawler, and 1 Bloodbones, then return to the NW Castle.

Unlocks: (b)Sleepra

I hated fighting so many random weak idiots for quests, but I was right there, so I decided to get this done. It was actually a fairly quick dive.

Title: Cure for Lycanthropy

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: There have been a number of sightings of Werewolves in the region just west of Elfheim recently, and it seems that these lycanthropic creatures are becoming an epidemic. Lycanthrophy is sometimes described as a curse, and sometimes a disease, and it seems like Dr. Unne could be close to cracking the case and finding a solution, but he needs more field data. What is this guy a doctor of, anyway?

Requirement: After speaking to Dr. Unne for the first time, defeat 10 Werewolves on the southern continent, and then speak to Dr. Unne again.

Unlocks: (e)Werebuster

I also got this done, beating plenty of Werewolves in the Marsh Cave.

When I went back to the Earth Cave, I read the text of the Path of Peace quest. I decided I would get through while running away from every encounter I could.

What was funny was I also decided to do the Batman quest and talk to bats, and I distracted myself from running and accidentally started killing some randos on B3. I decided it was worthwhile to just start over.

On my way back down, I opened some treasures and met Ogre Mages.

Title: Weathering the Storm

Author: nesplayer & Jay_Shaw (2025)

Story: The party's White Mage is aware of a technique which will allow him to protect himself and his companions from all types of ice spells. However, in order to learn it, he must first observe a relatively slow opponent attempt to use a Blizzard spell against the entire party.

Requirement: Encounter an Ogre Mage with all party members alive. Allow it to cast Blizzara, and the white mage must survive the battle.

Unlocks: (w)NulFrost

I started encountering WzOgre / Ogre Mage groups in B4, in treasure chests. Since I was trying to do Path of Peace, I made sure that the encounter was still unrunnable before proceeding with the battle.

After this, we allowed it to cast Blizzara and then defeated it, fulfilling this quest.

Also for the sake of Path of Peace, when I met the Sphinxes I checked that I couldn't escape before beating them.

Then, without much issue, we met Lich!

I had Lenna cast NulBlaze and NulShock, while Vivi used Temper on both Cecil and Locke. I didn't try stacking Temper, just because I wasn't sure that would work in this version... and my damage seemed good enough that it wasn't worth fussing about.

Eventually, Vivi and Lenna joined in with damaging spells and we took Lich out in a few turns. Not long after that, we won!

I wasn't watching too closely, but it was clear to me that I had done well over 400 HP (as in the NES original). I guessed that I must've done 800 damage (as in Dawn of Souls). Well, shortly after the fight, I checked the built-in bestiary...

1200 HP!? That's madness. The balance in this version sure feels like it's all over the place. Between this and all of the encounter differences, this is hardly the authentic experience I was promised. Whatever.

Anyway, beating Lich here also completed Path of Peace for me. I also talked to a lot of bats - roughly 40 of 'em - but not enough to complete the I'm Batman quest.

Title: Path of Peace

Author: KingRamz (2019)

Story: Esterith, a priestess at the Clinic in Elfheim, wishes you to teach the world the virtues of mercy and nonviolence. The best way to teach is by example.

Requirement: Complete a trip through the Cavern of Earth from B1 to the exit behind Lich without killing any monsters, save those you cannot run from (eg. Piscodemons, Earth Elementals, Ogre Mages and Lich).

Unlocks: (w)Cura

There wasn't much else I could get done before returning to Crescent Lake to get a Canoe... however, I did take the time to wander through the forest.

Title: Appreciating Nature: Crescent Lake Edition

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In the legend of Wood the fighter and his companions, there was no greater obstacle they faced than the treacherous journey to Crescent Lake when they were seeking additional equipment. It was said that the party fell an incredibly short distance from their ultimate destination. It was a great learning opportunity and a great trial with little in the way of reward, but perhaps if you can follow in Wood's footsteps you will learn something as well.

Requirement: In a single trip to Crescent Lake, step in every single forest tile outside of Crescent Lake before entering the town.

Unlocks: (a)Buckler

This was so particular issue, and this meant we could grab Locke a Buckler when we finally got into the town. With this, and our upgrades for Cecil and Lenna, I thought it was worth taking a snapshot of their loadouts.

Vivi is still using a Mythril Dagger and is otherwise dressed like Lenna. It's not a particularly bad loadout for anyone, although a fighter at this point in the game might normally be decked out in more silver/mythril equipment.

With my new Canoe, I needed to figure out where to go next. I thought the Citadel of Trials (formerly the Castle of Ordeals) would be a good destination, but very little of its prizes are actually usable yet. I read through some quests and eventually found one involving beating a White Dragon and a Zombie Dragon in that order, so I decided to go to the Ice Cave first.

The rivers were... weird. My knowledge of the NES and Famicom releases of Final Fantasy is pretty darn strong, and I know that there is separate domain mapping for the rivers in the southern continent and for the northern continents. Where the southern rivers - where you'd generally go first - tends to feature tons of Caribes, Hydras, and Ochos/Ochus, the northern ones have a few tougher enemies, like Red Caribes, Frost Gators and Naochos/Neochus. Clearly every river encounter I had in the southern continents' rivers were from the northern continents... and those monsters didn't mess around.

Again, this is the kind of change with encounter behaviour that would be easy to overlook, but its another little thing calling the authenticity of the Pixel Remaster version into question.

Because of those nasty river monsters, we camped up before heading into the Ice Cave. There are a lot of quests that involve this place, and some were much more attainable-seeming than others. I did not endeavor to do all of them now!
I fought a lot more White Dragons than is normal! I guess that's great since there are at least three quests involving White Dragons specifically.

Title: Snicker-snack

Author: beege_man (2025)

Story: One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.

Requirement: Kill a Dragon or Wyvern type enemy in a single attack.

Unlocks: (e)Vorpal Sword

To set up the finish of this quest, I had Locke and Cecil get rid of one White Dragon and had Vivi buff Cecil with Temper on the first turn... so that Cecil could clobber the other White Dragon on the next turn.

No problem!

Title: Forging Frost

Author: FreshFeeling (2025)

Story: To create the legendary Ice Brand sword, it has been theorized that you could freeze the breath of a White Dragon!

Requirement: In battle with a White Dragon, allow it to use Icestorm at least once, cast either (b)Blizzara or (b)Blizzaga on it, and then defeat it.

Unlocks: (e)Ice Brand

I actually did this quest more than once; I got wiped by Dark Wizards (aka MAGEs) more than once, and I felt like this effectively undid this quest since getting hit by Icestorm is meant to consume some resources. Thus, after my party wipe and at the start of my last good attempt, I repeated this. As usual, I had a stream issue - this one was different, caused by a brief but total internet outage for my home - so this part was right around the cusp of when the second, shorter video started.

Title: Robes of the Deadly Mages

Author: nesplayer & Jay_Shaw (2025)

Story: The party's Black Mage has become aware that mages in the Cavern of Ice are capable of casting a spell which can inflict instant death against someone. However, in order to commit this technique to memory, he will need to approach these mages in a location where they are certain to appear and inspect one of their robes after they are slain.

Requirement: WIth the party's black mage alive, inspect the chest containing Clothes in the Cavern of Ice next to the spiked square.

Unlocks: (b)Death

Remember how I mentioned that I had a TPKO against Dark Wizards/MAGEs? It happened right here!

This battle started out so strangely. All four Dark Wizards used physical attacks against me. I was thinking, "I can't believe how easy this is!". I was surprised, however, that all of my own attacks were doing pathetic damage. I had the entire party using regular attacks, too, hoping I might be able to do a different quest (Professional Jewelers). Well, after they stopped their basic attacks... the fight changed a lot.

Yikes! That hasn't happened much. While it seems a bit cheesy, auto-saves are built into this version of the game, so I went with that. That's why I had to re-do the prior quest. The auto-save didn't lend itself to fantastic luck either, though.

We ended up reloading that save, too. Ultimately it was my third auto-save load where I finally checked the Clothes chest and won. I didn't want to endure a barrage of Thundagas and Firagas so instead of using no magic, I had Vivi casts Blizzara. That worked very nicely, completing the quest.

The forced undead group and other White Dragons were fairly kind to me.

I skipped the treasure room full of gil in the bottom left corner of the next room, and worked my way up to the EYE who is evil. I decided to cast Silence on the Evil Eye, which worked, but didn't matter since Cecil and Locke defeated it on turn 1.

With that, we earned the Levistone!

We left successfully, and went to claim the airship.

Naturally, this opens up a ton of quests. I decided to quickly finish this:

Title: An Old Man and His Dragon

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Story: Farmer Jim of Melmond recently received a magical message beetle from his brother, who sought the treasure of a White Dragon. It turns out that Jim's brother was caught in the jaws of a White Dragon! If we can hustle to the Cavern of Ice and defeat a White Dragon, maybe we can still save him.

Requirement: Talk to the farmer in Melmond, then defeat a White Dragon in the Cavern of Ice, and return to the farmer.

Unlocks: (e)Wyrmkiller

I went through the list of quests and I decided I really wanted to go to the Citadel of Trials next. Given what I've learned about how fixed encounters have changed, I was nervous about one quest that involved beating Zombie Dragons in the Citadel of Trials with a solo fighter. What if there's only ever a single encounter with Zombie Dragons there? I decided to go to the volcano - Mount Gulg - to burn everyone down to 1 HP so that Cecil could easily solo the Citadel of Trials. Well... saying "easily" might be a bit silly! Time will tell.

I ended up saving directly outside of the Citadel of Trials with Cecil in good shape and everyone else dead.

Supposing I get just a little bit of luck, this'll be great! I'll get the Ice Brand soon, which he can wield, and he might be able to unlock the Sun Blade, Mythril Gloves, and Dragon Mail all at once. I will attempt that next time.

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Final Fantasy PR (Steam) Side Quest Challenge Part II

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:38:51 GMT

In the first session, I completed about 30 quests of what was 116 at that time. On August 4th, I continued. With a few new additions from GameFAQs, there are now 125 quests.

I started out by realizing that the Battle Axe I was eligible for was probably worthwhile, so I scooted up to Pravoka to grab it. While I was there, I did a quick quest.

Title: Ableism Awareness

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Matoya's blindness has left her particularly keen with regards to auditory information... in fact, she finds loud noises particularly annoying. Avoid disturbing her with noisy equipment and she will be able to help you learn a new trick.

Requirement: Visit Matoya, starting from Cornelia or Pravoka without using the ship or airship. From the time you step foot in the forest near her cave, avoid carrying any loud, rattling equipment, including Chain, Iron, Silver or Steel armor, helmets, or gauntlets, as well as the Iron Staff / Crosier and Iron Nunchuk weapons.

Unlocks: (b)Focus

I had labelled this quest as "abandoned" so it wasn't showing in the list, but I realized it might be useful for other quests. Some quests are specified as pre-requisites of others, after all! And given all of the trouble I had getting Thunder, I may as well learn Focus. I was at Pravoka anyway and this was pretty simple.

Next, I went to the Marsh Cave. I had a few false starts caused by quick battles that went wrong. I bought lots of Antidotes and Potions for the trip. I sure fought a lot of wolves! Perhaps in a bit of foreshadowing, sometimes it seems like I just get the same encounter over and over. In the Marsh Cave, I grabbed the free Dagger, which I'm eligible to use, so Vivi wielded it.

Shortly after getting the Dagger, Locke died in a fight with Gargoyles. I figured I would get a quest done and back out instead of reloading entirely (partly because reloading complicates my quest tracking).

Title: Take This Copper!

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: The Elves have learned to work with copper to make protective gear, but their methods are very unorthodox. To craft the perfect bracelet, they need some ingredients.

Requirement: Kill a Green Slime and a Grey Ooze.

Unlocks: (a)Copper Armlet

I happened to get into a fight with some spiders, a Green Slime and a Grey Ooze on the way out. Vivi wiped them with Fira and that made it easy.

Title: Pure Bodyguarding

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Requirement: Starting from the empty room at the dead end in the first level of the Marsh Cave, return to Elfheim with at least one living party member taking no damage.

Unlocks: (w)Poisona

It turns out that dead end is just a dead end with no empty room - FlamingXP or I had mis-remembered - but I think I covered this by intent. I went to the end of the dead end, then walked back to Elfheim. Locke was dead, Cecil and Lenna took damage, but Vivi didn't, staying at 113 HP and effectively bodyguarding the skittish elven child!

Back in Elfheim, we revived Locke and healed up and got Copper Armlets for the three of our party members that it might be an asset for. We also grabbed Poisona. I visited the NW Castle (Western Keep) to start one of the Double, Double, Toil and Trouble quests, and then to run into Ghasts I chose to do this:

Title: Appreciating Nature: Elfheim Edition

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: When travelling through the Elfheim region, it was said that Wood's companions were able to convince him that nature needed no further appreciation because the elves are a bunch of tree-hugging hippies. Wood travelled through the Elfheim region, hiding his tears, as his companions urged him toward their destinations. It would put Wood's nature-protecting soul at ease if someone were to carefully inspect and appreciate the forests of Elfheim.

Requirement: In a single trip, step in every single contiguous forest tile in the area west of Elfheim / south of Northwest Castle.

Unlocks: (w)NulBlaze

Wouldn't you know that one I had activated a quest asking me to defeat Ghasts, that they never showed up again? I had seen them before going to the castle, but I don't think I met a single one after! After another round of healing, I went back to the Marsh Cave, where this happened:

Title: How Can You See In That Thing?

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: Helmets can be very useful, but not if it impairs the wearers vision. The party's fighter must get used to fighting in the dark before becoming comfortable wearing one.

Requirement: Kill 4 enemies with the party's fighter while he's inflicted with the Dark status.

Unlocks: (a)Great Helm

It's funny, but there are relatively few enemies in this game who can inflict the Dark status, and it doesn't stick around after battle. This means you need to do this during the battle where you get afflicted with blindness. It turns out the early-game Shadow enemies are perfect for this, because their damage and general threat level is very low. I just sat there waiting until they blinded Cecil, and then had Cecil clobber them all with his eyes closed. This happened in two consecutive encounters with 3 Shadows.

Title: Chain Is Great But Steel?

Author: hawkeyerules (2020)

Story: The party's fighter was walking through Cornelia when a guard called them over. They had a conversation about the value of chain armor compared to iron plate. "Legend has it", the guard drew nearer and whispered, "that in a chest in the Marsh cave there is a suit of Iron Armor for FREE.".

Requirement: Gain access to the Ship and Chain Mail. Go into the Marsh Cave and retrieve the Iron Armor from the chest.

Unlocks: (a)Iron Armor

This is one of the weirdest ones. I am not sure how effectively I'm playing by the rules here, because it turns out the Iron Armor chest has been fully removed from the Pixel Remaster version of Final Fantasy. I had recently played the GBA Dawn of Souls version and I had even said, when I played that I looked for Iron Armor and couldn't find it. In fact, one of the chests that used to hold Iron Armor now has a Phoenix Down... which didn't even exist in the original Final Fantasy!

With this in mind, I think getting this Phoenix Down - which, by the way, I'm not using - meets the requirements for this quest. If it doesn't, then this quest is now impossible (and it seems like this isn't the only one where subtle but significant changes in the game caused impossible quests). I got another Iron Armor from a chest shortly after in the locked Cornelian treasure rooms anyway. So... I marked it complete! Come at me, I guess?

The Piscodemons - or WIZARDs - were up next. In this version of the game, instead of being a "spiked square" they are a monster-in-a-box.

I got four of them. I had Vivi cast Fira to soften them up, which helped a lot. Despite his robust defenses, Cecil was utterly clobbered. But we won and got the Crown.

Before leaving, I kept checking every room I could in the Marsh Cave still seeking Iron Armor but it wasn't there. I left and it wasn't too bad getting out safely without Cecil. In fact, this might present an opportunity!

Title: Pity of the Guard

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: The guards of Cornelia are among the most consistently well-equipped in the land. And given that Garland has left, the rest are mostly well known for their compassion as well. They won't mind the discipline that they'll take for misplacing their equipment if it means helping out someone in desperate need.

Requirement: Speak to any guard in Cornelia with a character who can equip an Iron Shield having 1 HP.

Unlocks: (a)Iron Shield

Reviving Cecil got him set to 1 HP, which made it pretty easy to enable the Iron Shield. In fact...

Title: The Gift of Life

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: To truly master the power over life, you must be aware of the value of life and how each life is different. You must observe life beginning and ending; only then will you hold power over it.

Requirement: Each party member must die and be revived in a clinic at least once.

Unlocks: (w)Life

I let Lenna die as well. Each character had died and been revived once now, so when the time comes I'll be able to make use of Life or Raise or whatever it's called.

For fighting Astos, there were three quests where the first spellcasting enemy you can face made opportunities to complete quests. Really, I think this might be the last opportunity before Lich? So I thought I should take advantage. One in particular I wanted to do was this:

Title: The Princess' Secret

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: In another universe (or timeline or something), the black mage's journey with the princess of Alexandria started off with clumsiness, coincidences, and plans gone awry. As part of this, the black mage accidentally let loose a fire spell that singed the white cloak of the princess of Alexandria, revealing her identity to the masses and throwing a wrench in the plans of his eventual companions. The black mage wishes they had used any other spell, or perhaps one that could put the fire out!

Requirement: The party's white mage must be hit by a fire-element spell or special attack while the party's black mage is alive and has no negative status effects. Both characters must survive the battle.

Unlocks: (b)Blizzara

When I went into the Astos fight, I was really hoping he would cast Fira, and I intended (at first) to cast NulBlaze to mitigate it. But, when I opened my spell list, I saw Silence there, and I got tempted! So what actually happened? On turn 1, Astos cast Fira, and then Lenna successfully landed Silence. I couldn't have hoped for a better result! Without all of his other spells, Astos was nearly completely helpless.

We also wanted to do this one:

Title: You Runed My Day

Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: One of the rune smiths in town has practiced channeling magic into weapons, but he needs the magical energy of an evil creature to recharge his runes.

Requirement: Use a bladed weapon to kill an enemy that can cast spells. Then drop the weapon used to kill the enemy before another encounter.

Unlocks: (e)Rune Blade

Cecil landed the finishing blow on Astos with a Saber! You can see that Lenna was using "defend", and that's because she was the only character not using a bladed weapon. Since this version of the game doesn't allow dropping weapons, I unequipped the Saber and sold it reasonably promptly, which is as close as I can get. (Don't worry, I wasted tons of money in other ways to compensate for the financial difference.)

This also means we get the Crystal Eye, allowing us to do tons of game progression and the quests that go with that.

While I was dealing with Matoya, I did this:

Title: The Sound of Nature

Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Let us follow in the footsteps of Wood the fighter once again and recall that his interest in nature was the product of someone who adored being able to magically restore one's voice. There is a lot of quality nature outside of Matoya's cave, and oh how she hates loud noises. If you appreciate her nature and scare some of the birds and monsters away from her cave perhaps she will help you restore your noisiness as well.

Requirement: After giving Matoya the Crystal, in a single trip, step in every single contiguous forest tile directly outside of Matoya's Cave.

Unlocks: (w)Vox

...and this one happened accidentally as I did it:

Title: An Old Man and his Horses

Author: FlamingXP (2025)

Requirement: After completing An Old Man and His Worms, defeat a group of 4 Crazy Horses in a forest.

Unlocks: (a)Leather Shield

This is the one that I had to fix up because there were two quests that unlocked Helm. At some point that must've been a typo or a copy/paste error on my part, because on the original post with that quest it had said Leather Shield all along. Anyway, I've got a better shield already... but there's always a chance this could matter later.

Having had some success letting party members die by leaving all of their armor off during sea battles, I decided to invest in this:

Title: The Power of Death
Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: To truly understand the power of death, you must become death and feel its hold falling over everyone you hold most dear. Recall the story of Tick the fighter and his companions, who were compelled to face each of the four fiends with a different member of the party having already succumbed to the beyond, each of them marked upon Tick's soul as an "X".

Requirement: Finish four consecutive battles each with a different light warrior dead at the end of the battle.

Unlocks: (b)Kill

This is the level 8 "power word-style" spell originally called XXXX. It's kind of neat to unlock this so early although I certainly won't be using it for a while. In a way, I'm sure it's easiest to do this while the team isn't amazingly buff. I actually died once in the course of this, but when I reloaded my save I managed to carefully have four consecutive battles where each had a different dead warrior. First was Locke, then Cecil, then Vivi, then Lenna. It helped to have them all start unequipped and then after I revived each of them I gave them all their gear so they could carry the team somewhat. For some reason it didn't occur to me that I ought to re-order the team.

I continued my Mystic Key looting after this. Elfheim and Cornelia were done, so I went to the Temple of Chaos yet. I was surprised that the spiked Gargoyles were gone. I got the Rune Blade, which was a fantastic upgrade for Locke the thief. Next, I headed to the Dwarf Cave. As I hit the port there, I noticed something.

Title: Pretty Good Axe
Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: The Titan guards an axe that's usually pretty unimpressive... at least in this game. In another game where it's a little bit better you can simply buy this axe at a port. Let's suppose you can do that now.

Requirement: Have 15,500 GP on hand and step on any port tile.

Unlocks: (e)Great Axe

I happened to have just barely crested 15,500 Gil! This is a reference to the Great Axe in Final Fantasy XII which I think is at Balfonheim Port. Then I talked to Nerrick. I also got the Great Helm here, which I could use because of what I did with the Shadows earlier.

I was also able to do this one, mostly:

Title: That's Not a Knife
Author: Diamond_Dragon (2020)

Story: Whether or not your nickname is "crocodile" you can still get a bigger knife. The dwarves don't get to work with silver as much as they'd like, so they're eager to help.

Requirement: Drop a dagger/knife and any item made from mythril/silver in the room with the dwarf smith. You may purchase/find a locked item for the purposes of dropping it in this quest, but it cannot be equipped or used in battle.

Unlocks: (e)Mythril Knife

To do this, I needed to consider my new Mythril Hammer "dropped" - e.g., ensure it's unequipped and then sell it. There was a hitch here where I had accidentally equipped the Mythril Hammer recently when I re-equipped Lenna. I feel a bit bad about that but it was a pretty minor oversight over a fairly short span of time so - although I wish I'd been more to-the-letter with the rules - I'm not going to dwell on it too much.

Title: Double, Double Toil and Trouble II
Author: beege_man (2020)

Story: The witch in Cornelia mentioned an even more powerful witch in a cave up north. After visiting her, she tells you to bring her the eye of a Lizard, a Warg Wolf's tooth, pus of Gigas Worm, and a poison sac. With these she can teach you to do more than just put things to sleep.

Requirement: Visit Matoya, then kill 1 Lizard, 1 Warg Wolf, 1 Gigas Worm, and 1 Tarantula or Cobra, then visit Matoya again.

Unlocks: (b)Dark

I had actually been waiting for ages to encounter a Lizard and finally ran into one. These Double, Double, Toil and Trouble quests are mostly linked so I'm really glad to get another out of the way; it had been feeling like a bottleneck. As I did this, I had Vivi in the leader of the party for a quest called

Title: More Than Just a Pretty Face
Author: Primus_Ultimas (2020)

Story: The party's black mage is growing frustrated at being relegated to simply support and wishes to prove that they are a valuable member of the party.

Requirement: With the party's black mage leading the party, win battles with a Goblin Guard, a Sahagin Chief, a Crawler, an Ogre, and a Grey Ooze in any order. The black mage must be in front for the battle and also land at least one physical strike on said monster, and survive.

Unlocks: (b)Temper

This required a mini-backtrack into the Marsh Cave. During all of this I had been hoping to encounter Green Slimes and Ghasts for another quest but they absolutely refused to show up. Also in the course of this, I tried going to the Mystic Key doors at the bottom of the Marsh Cave but I had a terrible time with Scorpions, leaving Vivi dead by the time we fought Anacondas (the ones that were COBRA on NES). Thankfully this particular quest was already complete.

We stayed here quite a while looking for both Green Slimes and Ghasts but neither appeared. I eventually got sick of waiting so we just won't have some of those Double, Double, Toil and Trouble quest rewards for a while. Those were mostly status effect spells. These enemies also appear in the Earth Cavern, I believe, so I'll probably still finish it without a terrible grind eventually.

I talked to Dr. Unne to start another quest and I got the Life spell. I popped over to Crescent Lake, mostly to get a Mythril Sword for Cecil, but I noticed when I fought Minotaurs and Trolls that they were worth over 1000 experience points altogether.

With that new info, I stripped Cecil down and did this quest:

Title: Fashionista Arylon
Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Arylon is one of the most talented and beautiful dancers in the known world and she holds others to a fairly high standard. There is no reason you can't fight evil while looking good, and she will reward warriors who can prove this.

Requirement: Win any battle with total experience over 1000 while only wearing defensive equipment each with an evade penalty of -2 or less, then talk to Arylon.

Unlocks: (a)Silver Armlet

With Cecil's bad armor situation he actually did get knocked out by Trolls once before I pulled this off successfully.
Y'know what's strange? The Cornelian dancer is unnamed in the Pixel Remaster version!

I actually didn't talk to her at this point chronologically; I did that after completing the next big quest. After that first visit to Crescent Lake, I decided to complete this:

Title: The Great Barrier Reef

Author: FreshFeeling (2025)

Requirement: Circumnavigate the entire southern continent by circling it with the ship, without entering a town or dungeon. Outside of battle, at least one tile of coastline should be visible at all times.

Unlocks: (e)Coral Sword

This took a really long time and wasn't very fun (bad quest maker!), but it's nice that it is done. In terms of dedicated time for a single quest, this was probably the longest besides fighting 32 Goblin Guards.

Title: Dwarven Hammer
Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: The dwarven blacksmith is known for his ability to craft quality hammers for metalwork, and the crude iron hammers made using salvaged iron is questionable for the kind of work he would normally undertake. If you can provide 5 pieces of fine elven mythril or silver, he'll be able to create much improved hammers that will surely help you down the line.

Requirement: With access to at least one Hammer, bring 5 pieces of Silver or Mythril equipment to the dwarven blacksmith and drop these when you speak with him.

Unlocks: (e)Mythril Hammer

This one was kind of dumb. While I was in Crescent Lake, I grabbed 5 Mythril Gloves. In getting those for 2000 gil each instead of Mythril Knives for 640 gil each, I wasted a ton of money that ought to pretty well make up for any I should've dropped instead of selling in the early game. I sold those Mythril Gloves and thus effectively completed this quest.

Title: Bikke's Boys Bite
Author: FreshFeeling (2019)

Story: Bikke's pirate are woefully underprepared for any serious battle and the light warriors learn this first hand. If they're ever going to be an effective pirate crew again in this crazy world, they'll need to seriously upgrade their gear. You can start by showing Bikke a selection of traditional pirate weapons that have more than 10 attack power.

Requirement: Talk to Bikke while carrying a Broadsword, a Sabre, and a Longsword. Carrying these, but not using them, is allowed for the purpose of fulfilling this quest.

Unlocks: (e)Longsword

Well, this was easy. Pointless, but easy.

I got a few more consumables, including some Gold Needles to prepare for Cockatrices in the Earth Cavern. Then I rested and saved up in Melmond.

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