Part 16: Part Sixteen: Exposition Exploration

Part Sixteen: Exposition Exploration


Now that we've rescued some stupid kids and they gave us a shitty bonus job, we're back out to sea to do some exploring.


On the way to our first destination, I'm attacked by Killer Fish. There are a bunch of enemies on the water, and none of them are very exciting or tough. Final Fantasy games in general tend to have a lot of enemy types with most of them being unremarkable, and this game is no exception. Also, nothing on this sea can be too powerful because the player has to go through here at a fairly large range of levels, so you end up outclassing pretty much every ocean enemy after the next dungeon.


Ocean enemy talk aside, the first destination is Vikings' Cove.


Because there's a super secret passage here.


And it leads to treasure!




A full set of second-tier elemental spells!

...Which is actually not as great as you might think. A Black Mage would probably only have one or two level 3 spell charges, and all of these are level 3 spells, with Blizzara having a slight edge over the others in terms of power. They'll become more valuable in about 15 or 20 levels, when I can actually start tossing level 3 spells around for a decent amount of time.


With that treasure collected, it's back out to sea, where I'm promptly attacked by a pair of Sea Tornadoes.


Oh, Sea Elementals. Whatever, it's the same damn thing.


The one on the right is attacking here. They attack by rearing up and spinning at you. They also die like chumps, so whatever.


Fun fact: because he kept dying like a tool, Sephy is still on job adjustment from his change back to Thief.


But one more fight fixes that! It also increases his value in a fight, because 14 Agility gives him an extra hit. You get one for every 7 Agility, if you're wondering.


Once I'm back on dry land, this happens.



And it gets kind of ugly. They just go straight after Jecht, who's stuck in the front row.


This is not a fight worth having.


But this happens. Flee has a "higher chance" of letting you escape battle. Now, I'm referencing an FAQ that has all the formulae &c. listed for attacks and hit numbers and spell power and whatever-the-fuck-else, but absolutely the only documentation I can find for Flee is that it has a "higher chance" of letting you escape battle. When it comes to escaping, I'm in the dark as far as numbers go.



I make it out the second time I try, though, which is nice. Relatively.


First new destination of the update: these woods.


And another goddamned back attack on the literally one tile separating me from the entrance to the woods.




Ffffuck that.


Oh, and Desch popped in to cast Thundara in that fight. It wasn't exactly stunning, and it certainly wasn't enough to make me stick around and slug it out.


Here's why we came to this particular forest, though: chocobos.


They aren't hard to catch in this game. They don't run away, they're not particularly scarce, and you don't have to play any minigames or anything.


Just walk up to one and you're riding it, listening to the chocobo theme:




Now, for no reason at all, I'm going to run around the edge of the continent on a chocobo.


There is a desert way to the north. Also visible: clouds. Why, oh why, are there clouds visible from the edge of the continent? Shouldn't it be the ocean? These are the questions I'm sure you're asking yourself right now, and rest assured, they will be answered by the end of this update.


There's a town here past these mountains. I can't get to it right now because it's outside of the area the ship can reach at this point.


Here's another view for you. It's blocked off for, uh, reasons. There's really no reason for it to be blocked, it just is.


A forest in the southeast. There's not really a lot around the edge of the continent, and you'd probably never come here unless you were doing what I'm doing right now. The devs didn't really make the most use of the space they had when they did up the maps for this game.


Over here: a cave I can't reach right now.


Aaaand we're back.


So I ditch the chocobo and enter...the Village of the Ancients!

Which has its own background music:



On a personal sidenote, I almost never notice game music, especially in portable games (I've gotten into the habit of playing portables with the sound off), so it's really nice when the game has tracks named like the ones in this game; they're easy to attach to locations and cues and whatnot. The tracks in a game like Metal Gear 2, though, were a bloody mess because they had fairly generic titles and similar sounds.


Let's explore this village, shall we?


First thing you can find: an invisible wall. This place is set up as a series of circular terraces, but you can't get all the way around and instead of blocking the path with a tree or a rock or something, the map designer went straight to an invisible wall. It's not a gamebreaker or anything, but it's a lazy design.


Haha, look at this guy. No wonder this place is called the Village of the Ancients, eh?


: The crystals exist to bring balance between these two forces. When the balance tilts too far one way, the crystals choose four mortals, and bless them with their power...Now that the balance has tilted toward darkness, four Warriors of the Light will be chosen, and tasked with bringing equilibrium to the world once more.

There, now you have Final Fantasy III's lore, and our goal in the game. Of course, we're still kind of in the dark about how to actually bring that balance back, but details.


Since it seems apropos, I'll also throw Desch's remarks about the village in here. Familiar, eh? Maybe Desch is finally regaining his memory.


Being a town, the Village of the Ancients has the requisite weapons shop. We have enough Serpent Swords for now, and enough bows and arrows forever, but only one elemental staff, so I change that by picking up a Light Staff and an Ice Staff. These will work like the Fire Staff, in that they'll sit in the inventory to let mages cast spells for free, and they open up my options to all three bottom-tier elemental spells. The best option here is the Light Staff, because Thunder has a spell power of 46, as opposed to 40 for Fire and 43 for Blizzard, but that is the most minute difference in the whole world, small enough that it exists well within the random area for each spell's damage, and the point I'm trying to make here is don't make a fuss about it.


On the second tier is a second invisible wall, but this one is much farther around the curve.


This is the invisible wall on the other side. There're probably only ten or so tiles blocked off here, and I think you can see most of them, so it's not saving anything, but hey, there you go.


On the second level, you can also find this kid.


Who makes you this offer. Which I've already done because I knew this was coming (and because it let me show off the edge of the continent).


So I talk to him to get this line. If you're not in the know because you're a Final Fantasy neophyte, both of the puns in this line are references to chocobo noises. "Wark" is the "classic" chocobo "line", used in Final Fantasy VII and VIII for sure, though I think it showed up in VI and maybe V, too. "Kweh" is the "modern" onomatopoeia, used since Final Fantasy IX.


Also, this kid's a prick and he can go fuck himself. Fucking Gnomish Bread.


This lady tells us about chocobos.


Behind her is the armour shop, where I can buy armour (or armor, if you want to be like that). I don't buy any, though, because I'm already equipped. Small aside, though, you can also see this game's lazy shop interface. Most modern RPGs offer you a comparison of your current equipment against whatever you're looking at buying. This game doesn't. It pretty much comes down to looking at two numbers, which yeah, you can do on your own, but it's still really low-rent to do it this way and it wouldn't take much to fix, especially because the game already does it in the actual equip screen.


I digress. Instead of talking about that, let's talk to this guy about this village.

: Long ago, our Rule also charged us with guarding the Tower of Owen.

What is the Tower of Owen, kid? Can you tell me that?

(He can't. Or won't. Whichever.)


And this guy explains why we saw clouds off the edge of the continent. I like the idea that it's just sort of common knowledge for the people 'round these parts and that's why the game doesn't mention it to you straight off like it's some big mystery or whatever.


The old guy also tells us about the Tower of Owen. I don't know the mechanics of the thing, and the game doesn't go into it, but they're also not important. It just is. It's an easy nit to pick with something like this, or magic mechanics, or job systems, to say "how does that work" and treat it like a failure for the story not to explain it, but it's really not necessary to explain every little thing, and most of the time the "explanations" are just nonsense thrown together to appease people who complain. Of course, it's also important to make sure that things are internally consistent - at least on some level - so that your story and world can be viewed comfortably by the average person, and it can be hard to do that without getting bogged down in the details.

Another important thing: you're all here to see pictures of a video game, not read my amateur opinion on writing.


Jecht is a fool.


What is this? It seems interesting.

: They attempted to harness the power of the light. They arrogantly assumed there was nothing they could not do... But they had thought wrong. It is said that four warriors emerged from the world of darkness, and stopped the destructive forces of light that our ancestors had conjured... ...But now, it is darkness that has emerged, bringing chaos and destruction in its wake. All that we can do is wait for the four warriors to appear once again.

It is interesting. Instead of the standard approach of "light=good, darkness=evil", this game treats them as two sides of the same thing, basically. Forces beyond the ken of man that you probably shouldn't fuck with too much. It's also a nice little touch that nobody knows who these kids are outside of a handful of people - even King Sasune was surprised when he found out they were the Warriors of Light - because they still look like regular kids. Nobody can tell at first blush that these are world-savers. It makes for a convenient shorthand, then, that the people who recognise them do recognise them: it means that those people are in the know about light and darkness and what's going on, that they're wise people who you should probably pay attention to.


Not something to pay attention to, really: the magic shop here. The second-tier elementals are available, but I already have a set. The only other thing that's interesting is Teleport, but I have neither the money to buy it nor the MP to expend on it. I might come back for it later.


This is just flavour text. The Village of the Ancients is like a religious collective, I guess?


There is also an item shop here.


I pick up 5 Echo Herbs and 5 Maiden's Kisses. Both will come in handy when I'm doing the next dungeon, even though I can just barely afford them.


I take the handful of gil I have left (289) and hit the inn. This game doesn't have Tents and the like, so inns are a lot more important than they tend to be in the games that do have, and that can make things more difficult because it places more of an emphasis on resource management than just having an item that you can use (even in restricted areas) to fully heal yourself. Of course, it shouldn't be in the same game as really long dungeons with no save points and no way to quickly get back to where you were if you bail, so it's kind of a wash.


Thanks, hoss.



Great, now I'm in shape to take on whatever may come.


And to find this last treasure in the Village of the Ancients.


Which I promptly give to Golbez. He's a bit behind Kuja, as far as Attack goes, but he can definitely hold his own in a fencing contest.


Another low-rent thing: inventories that don't do this without player input. I can't think of anything they actually add to a game, and the functionality for it obviously exists in the game, so there we are.

Mognet



Another letter from Takka, in Kazus! Today he's telling us about a "legendary smith" who can fix anything! Will this be helpful in the future? I guess we'll find out. Thanks for the tip, Takka.