FreshFeeling Gaming

The final session of this VYUOKITE playthrough was played at some point between June 4th and June 7th, 2017.

There was a very short recording when I started and a blip before the larger recording for the day. I was just nervous because of the connection quality, and perhaps that worry was unfounded. Anyway, here's the main part:

We started by entering the Mirage Tower. As you may expect if you know this game, we found a ton of great equipment in the Mirage Tower very quickly after entering. We checked who could use what, and we found that the Aegis Shield, Vorpal Sword, Sun Sword and Dragon Armor were all useless to us. Thor Hammer is very useful but can't actually be equipped by anyone.

Battles were pretty uninteresting. There are a lot of large groups that lend themselves to battle using spellcasting items (Thor Hammer, Zeus Gauntlet, Mage Staff, etc.), so battles felt somewhat repetitive and there wasn't much in the way of danger. The Blue D didn't stand up well against the Avengers.

In the Floating Castle, there were more wonderful items of questionable utility to my team. We got a ProRing that we were able to put to use. As I've come to expect, the Bane Sword, White Shirt and Black Shirt were not able to be equipped but at least they've all got potential use with the item command. We did find that all of Thor, Cap and Iron were able to use the ProCape, although carrying it long-term would mean throwing out some other useful spellcasting armor.

I dropped a ProRing to carry the loot here, and I want Cap to have a ProRing, so what I'm likely to end up doing is throwing away the White Shirt when I get back to town since my characters have tons of charges of INV2 anyway. Hm, I guess I could say the same about the Zeus Gauntlet.

It would've been so cool if someone could use the Katana, but that did not end up being the case.

On the long bridge, I gave some consideration to intentionally lollygagging about to find a WarMech. That didn't last long before I got bored. Our battle with Tiamat was somewhat interesting, though. I had both bad luck and bad strategy, but won anyway. The bad luck aspect was Luke - the low-HP one - getting physically attacked to critical on turn 1, then CUR4ing himself on turn 2, then getting physically attacked from full HP to death on turn 2. The bad strategy aspect was throwing up a bunch of resistance spells despite most of the party having Ribbons on. The Bane Sword wasn't working in the first few turns so I decided to playfully use a bunch of NUKE and FADE spells.


After this, I sorted out my equipment and attempted to fill out the spell lists with my remaining money before diving into the Temple of Fiends again. We ended up filling out the spell lists completely except for one level 8 spell for Thor. Before going in, we looked like this:

Thor:




Cap:
, plus LIT3 and INV2.

Iron:


Luke:


Equipment:

The weapons listed aren't 100% accurate, actually, as I sold that Katana, too.In this battle, Luke was killed and Cap was very seriously damaged by these Frost Ds' Blizzard attacks. That image also happens to show off their magic defense statistics which, along with Cap not wearing a Ribbon, may also explain how the team took so much damage. The magic defense stats are another thing that seems to oscillate wildly at each level up.

This session was played at some point between May 30th and June 5th, 2017. There was actually a tiny first part that was mostly me screwing around with settings and the camera before the actual play session started, which serves the purpose of, uh, showing the party entering the Earth Cave. With that, we begin the proper play session.


Things had been pretty easy in general, to date, as two of my characters are dramatically overpowered. This is partly traded-off by the fact that one of my characters is dramatically underpowered and dies all of the time. However, I'm using a couple of quality-of-life codes including one that means dead characters continue to level up, so as long as the entire party isn't subject to death or petrification it doesn't seem like there is much that can stop this team.

We went into the depths of the Earth Cave, having no issues including the kind that can be caused by Coctrices. With a bit of fastforward-enabled combat, it didn't take long to reach Lich. I took a turn to buff, actually, but that was probably pretty unnecessary.


Back in Melmond, I finally got Thor some level 5 magic, which I had bought for pretty well the rest of the team already. Thor was able to learn exactly three level 5 spells, as follows:

Then we went back to the Coneria area to beat some Imps for a quick cash infusion before Crescent Lake. In Crescent Lake, there were no new viable armor or weapon upgrades at all. Most of the team was able to learn a few of the very useful level 6 spells, like LIT3, FOG2, and INV2, except for Cap whose only level 6 spells was STUN... for which he had 9 spell charges.

We got our Canoe and went to Gurgo Volcano. The volcano has a ton of treasure, but nearly everything is an item we have already had access to that we've identified as being unequippable. I was really hoping that the Giant Sword and/or Ice Sword would be usable, but neither was. Neither was the Flame Shield.

When we went to get the Flame Armor, the Red D got a turn off and used its Blaze ability to defeat Luke.

Then I didn't even bother to check whether the Flame Armor was useful for anyone before facing Kary. Even Kary was pretty mean; she attacked Iron and defeated him on turn 1, where I can set the team to heal and buff. Naturally, she did not do so well on turn 2.

I returned to Crescent Lake, I checked whether the Flame Armor was useful for anyone (it wasn't) and sold things.

I chose to head for the Castle of Ordeals first. I was still thinking about whether to do the class change or not at this point, seeing as I had absolutely no idea what impact it could have one the team's access to spells and equipment. I did know it would change the index of their class to be some other random equipment or something so I figured that would be amusing.

In Ordeals, Luke was killed by a group of R. Goyles casting FIR2; Cap used LIFE on him later. The Zeus Gauntlet wasn't able to be equipped by anyone, so I gave it to Iron who has no weapon and 1 point of damage so that he would have a consistent offensive option. Nobody was able to equip the Heal Staff either, so I gave that to Iron at first but it was going to be passed around. I gave the Gold Bracelet to Luke, who equipped it. The Zombie Ds were a non-obstacle.

Next up, the Ice Cave. I used a House and Tent outside. Unlike basically anything so far, there was some legitimate possible danger here due to Mages (RUB, FIR3), Sorcerers (mass stun, death touch), and large undead groups (stun). Iron and Luke both got petrified by Coctrices in the very first hallway; I had 3 Soft potions to help with this. Our first Mage encounter was with one Mage, so it wasn't scary and it ended quickly.

We got the Flame Sword but nobody could use it. Same with the Ice Armor. When a Mage eventually did have an opportunity to cast RUB, it targetted Thor and failed; I don't actually know what my team's magic defense values are since that's a hidden stat in this game and I wasn't watching memory values.

The Eye was no problem. In fact, its threat is mostly pretty neutered by having over 300 current HP, which I was able to reach with Thor and Cap (and Iron was close). I decided to grind on the Eye for a bit seeing as it was almost no threat. With Iron earning level 19 here, he had 320 max HP.



At this point, I figured I would do the class change. The characters' stats are pretty generous and it's not like they were going to go down, but there's a good chance it could give them some equipment options. This makes it a bit of a shame that I've sold (or in some cases, had to sell) certain unique items like the Flame Armor and various magic swords. Class change might also possibly result in having real character graphics!

We exited the Ice Cave successfully on the first try, still at level 19 (which is a rather generous level for this point in the game), and went to Cardia.

Although you can't see actually differences in the classes here...

• Thor has class changed from Thor Hammer to Wooden Armor.
• Cap has class changed from Cap to Ribbon. (Ribbon America!)
• Iron has class changed from Iron Armor to Dragon Armor. (Dragon Man?)
• Luke has class changed from Power Staff to Vorpal.

With the bit of extra equipment we had on hand (Ice Shield, Ice Armor, Zeus Gauntlet...), we found absolutely nothing extra that anybody could equip. I did the Waterfall and nobody could equip the Defense or Wizard Staff, either. I also accidentally moved Luke's Silver Knife and found that his new class (Vorpal) could not equip the Silver Knife anymore, so he now has no weapon. We were able to use the Ribbon though, so that's nice!

While the class change didn't help any of the characters to actually resemble... characters, it did change their graphics a bit so they look like a comparatively delightful random stripe pattern.


We ended up saving in Onrac, so we didn't really have an opportunity to investigate other equipment options yet.

VYUOKITE is a Game Genie code for Final Fantasy on the NES. If you look it up, you'll find results that suggest it allows you to pick from "over 250 different characters" when you start.

I've been a long time enjoyer of the Final Fantasy NES board on GameFAQs. Every so often, someone (like ChaseXtreme) would post about this code and its effects. The oldest thread I found on the subject was this one by spriteless in 2010. ChaseXtreme also brought it up a few times: first time was here in 2016 and the second time was here in 2017. The earlier ones didn't seem to garner much interest, but in Chase's 2017 thread there was more interest, including my own.

What it seems it's doing, technically, is changing exactly one byte in the ROM that is the upper bound of the number of classes you're allowed to select from when you're choosing your party.
The normal list of classes you can pick from in the game is like this, indexed 0 through 5: Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage.
The list of classes that are normally used in the game is like this, indexes 0 through 11 (hex x0B): Fighter, Thief, Bl.Belt, RedMage, Wh.Mage, Bl.Mage, Knight, Ninja, Master, RedWiz, Wh.Wiz, Bl.Wiz.
With VYUOKITE, that index "5" that the class selection would normally cap at is changed to something close to its maximum value. The class names end up being each successive delimited piece of text that appears in the game's data, so after Bl.Wiz it goes like this: HP Wiz, Wiz, ST Wiz, PO Wiz, PO Wiz, LUTE, CROWN, CRYSTAL, HERB, etc. This ends up including every item, weapon, armor and spell in the game (but not every monster or piece of dialogue).

I was curious about this, so in 2017 when Chase was talking about it I analyzed the bytes for each class based on how many bytes classes normally use. In this post, I shared this Google doc where I tried to predict the values for each class. This prediction didn't work. To this day, I don't know why, but I wonder if perhaps the classes are accessed out of RAM instead of ROM or something like that.

Testing my hypotheses, anyway, I decided to give it a try. A themed try, at that! I had been hearing suggestions about how so many Final Fantasy things are also names and then, as a big MCU fan, I decided to go with something Avengers-ish.

This was the sidebar that hovered beside the gameplay while I played on Twitch:


Just to be clear, the theming was just for fun and didn't actually impact the way the game was played at all; these characters were, for most purposes, random.

You'll note the "quality-of-life" codes mentioned there. This was really a playthrough of curiosity rather than a challenge so to make the early game viable (in some cases) and less mind-numbing (in others), I wanted to be able to give the characters a strong start; this idea, and even the specific codes, were stolen from ChaseXtreme.

I started playing on May 26, 2017. Shortly after this run I changed to my current YouTube account so the dates on the videos you'll see embedded/linked here won't be 100% accurate. It was also just the second run I ever streamed, so I was new to it and had an awful echo on my microphone. As always, take it or leave it.

At level 3, Luke went up to 2 max HP.Note that characters don't necessarily follow a pattern of level-by-level spell increases. In fact there's mostly no pattern at all. For now, this was the Thor and Cap show with two bystanders.

We grabbed the Cap from the Temple of Fiends and we found that all four characters could equip it. Thor dealt 439 damage to a Spider before Garland, so I figured there wasn't much risk in fighting him. That was valid.


The trek to Pravoka was pretty uneventful; Luke's evasion had underflowed by wearing the Cap, so he wasn't damaged on the way and the rest of the team neatly handled the offense. I attempted to figure out which magic people could use and spent the majority of my money before even looking at weapons and armor (which was dumb). With the leftovers, I did buy a Scimtar but literally nobody could wield it. We also found that nobody could use a Wooden Shield but everyone could equip Gloves, so I spent the rest of my money on Gloves.

I actually backtracked a little bit hoping to encounter just a couple of Imps to boost Luke somewhat and solve my financial issues before fighting the Pirates. Luke started to be able to deal reasonable damage, actually, where Iron - who had no weapon - still couldn't.

When we did fight the Pirates, unfortunately, literally the first action of the entire battle killed Luke - who had 5 max HP at level 6. Everyone else was fine, of course.



It didn't make any sense to do a grind before the Marsh Cave with my quality-of-life Imp-based codes active, nor did I really see the point of it, so after healing and shopping in Elfland I wrapped up for this first session. Between Pravoka and Elfland, the only weapon upgrade anyone got at all was Luke using a Large Knife.


Armor was going okay, though. The more universally-equippable items by the game's logic also seem to be pretty well universally-equippable when we break the game's logic.


Given Thor and Cap's absurd stats, I'm sure we're more than ready for not only Marsh Cave but quite possibly endgame, although it would be maybe sort of nice if Luke could participate. I guess we'll see how that develops.