Final Fantasy III Part #27 - Part Twenty-Seven: Cave of Pains in My Ass

Part 27: Part Twenty-Seven: Cave of Pains in My Ass

Part Twenty-Seven: Cave of Pains in My Ass

In case you've forgotten, we need to take Aria to the Water Temple to get the crystal shard so that we can bring the surface world out of stasis, which it's been in for somewhere between ten and a thousand years.

So let's do that. This altar was blocked by a barrier last time we were here.

But Aria's got that under control, and we've got a Crystal Shard.

: So our next stop is the sealed water crystal?

: Yes. It must be imbued with the shard's light.

: Miss Aria...where did this shard come from?

: we priestesses sealed the crystal to protect it from the darkness, in the hopes that one day, the Warriors of the Light would come. This shard was created to break the crystal's seal.

As near as I can tell from the other LPs, none of these lines were in the NES version. Nor was the world flooded over by darkness, but just by plain water because of the earthquake mentioned at the beginning of the game. Time might have been frozen, but I'm not 100%. Either way, the point I'm trying to make is that this version really expands the text of the story, but it also introduces some...incongruities.

That aside, it's time to go deal with another cave and more dumb cave shit. How many caves do you need in a game? This is like Fallout 3, where the only way to get anywhere was through the bloody subway.

_{That's not really true, Fallout 3 was much worse for samey dungeons. The only thing I really remember about that game was fighting mutants in dark tunnels.}

Oh, Aria's got a scene for us.

She's also always smiling; she's very serene, which seems fitting of someone in her role.

The cave we need to go to, by the way, is right here, on the same island as the temple. We could have entered it before, but couldn't actually have done anything.

This is the Cave of Tides, and it has some background music that should be well familiar by now:

If you recognise the track and the pattern, you should already know what we're in for here.

It also has these dorky looking fuckers for me to kill.

The Light Staff is passable in this dungeon, since a bunch of things are weak to lightning here, but it's starting to wane. It's not a one-hit kill, that's for sure.

Terrain is pretty good, too. It gets a fairly large boost from stats and has some indeterminate relationship with Defense. The main problem is that it doesn't let you choose a target, so it might dump a boatload of damage on something with 1 HP left or other crap like that.

Kuja can hold up pretty well here with that Blood Sword. I think she'd be getting more out of it as a Warrior, though, but them's the breaks.

Enemies are starting to hit harder, too. I'm still short on levels, since I haven't been doing any grinding or anything, and it's really starting to catch up to me; it's been easy enough to deal with up to this point, especially in Castle Hein, but I've had to be lucky a few times, too.

This place is also harder than the dungeons on the Floating Continent, at least to me. I don't know why, but as soon as you get into the surface world, things start to get harder real quick.

This is another Geomancer spell. It hits everything, and has a decent chance to cause instant death, but still misses a lot and isn't the best roll in general. It can come up in boss fights and waste your turn, too, of course.

Here's an EXP value for you. I think I took this so I could tell you about how lame the gains are in this place, so there you go. I think it's around level 20 that EXP requirements start to really take off, too, and that's about where I am now. At least there are a lot of encounters, I guess.

See the door? If you were wondering, that's why there was no point in coming here earlier; you can't get through it without Aria.

Oh, jeez, you don't need to give it a fancy important-sounding title, it's a fuckin' locked door.

Whatever, yeah, just do it up.

This seems like as good a time as any to mention (or repeat) that I like Aria's design: it's really simple, which fits the surface world (to me) being in a state of crisis - there's not a lot of time to spend on fancy outfits - and her role as a priestess, which doesn't imply anything ostentatious (again, to me). It's also the polar opposite of Sara's dumbass bikini dress bullshit, and I hate that, so there we go.

Oh, this is a holdover from the NES, where a sprite couldn't be animated to show that. Here it's just redundant.

Screen flashes white, girl gets up, door's gone. Functionally the same as a rock opening a hole in a wall, but more interesting to watch.

While we're on the topic of Aria, here's her support attacks. Protect reduces physical damage taken, which is semi-useful, but battles generally don't last long enough for it to really shine. Cura is just some good healing, but she seems to do it less often than Protect. Aria offers decent support, but it's still pretty rare and not all that awesome.

I suppose you could say that now we're in the Cave of Tides "proper".

Have a long bridge to welcome you.

The waterfalls are kind of neat.

Jecht gets killed in a random encounter on the bridge. Jecht is a really soft target, and White Mages are generally kind of shitty and bring the party down, but they're also necessary unless you want to spend a ton on Potions every time you're in a town.

Golbez isn't much better, defensively.

But he can bring the pain. In a few levels/job levels, he'll be able to one-shot standard enemies, which will be nice.

Once Jecht is back on his feet and healed up, I get back to crossing this long-ass bridge. I just said the waterfalls are neat, but the effect is kind of ruined by the empty black space that the whole thing is in. I figure it's a DS space-saving thing, but dungeons could really be better designed, and I think it would do a lot for the game.

Big frogs hang out in this cave, and they make me happy that I didn't have to turn into a frog myself to get here.

Equipment lists are kind of sparse in this game, which contributes to Jecht's problems.

Golbez handles everything with Whirlpool, though. It's a good instant death spell.

Transitions like that are still bullshit. At least do something to connect the rooms.

When the water shows up, this cave can be kind of nice.

Short floor, though. Combining the long bridge with the water would have been cool, and cutting out some smaller rooms would make the dungeon less tedious.

I took this shot just because I like the colour of the water here. For all of its myriad mistakes, I generally like the art direction in this game.

Themed dungeons aren't bad, either. It at least gives them some distinguishing qualities, instead of just being more places to walk through and fight monsters in.

Here's the branching path of this dungeon.

And here are some silly looking crab monsters.

Agaliarept probably comes from some real word or whatever, but it's just sort of letter salad to me.

Just a nice shot of a waterfall.

This optional path involves a lot of going up and down stairs.

Blizzaga is the eventual reward. It would be a lot more useful if I had a Black Mage in my party. Instead, it just sits in my inventory.

Fun fact: I think this is the first time where I've been in a Final Fantasy game without a source of Black Magic for so long.

Quick run back to the fork in the road and I can actually make progress.

And also show off the Geomancer's special secret attack that only comes up, like, 2% of the time in this place.

It's very powerful, with a rating of 110. Of course, Terrain uses a different formula than Black Magic, so I don't know how it actually stacks up against those spells.

Reaching this floor (which also looks interesting) means that you've almost reached the end of the dungeon.

Up these stairs and through this door, and we'll be there. Of course, one last enemy attacks me, just to be a hassle.

The last room has sort of a different feel to it.

Run forward to trigger the cutscene.

: Crystal of water... It is time for you to regain your light!

Aria gets right to doing her thing.

Yes, thank you game.

And from another angle. Girl has a lot of hair.

Honestly, I can't really see a difference.

Do I know how to do that?

: Only then will the crystal regain its true light, and banish the darkness from this world--then time will flow once more...

Mission accomplished, awesome times, good work team.

Everybody starts to walk out.

But Aria sees something and spazzes out, shoving Sephy.

Then she collapses. This does not look good for Aria, she's right back to how we found her.

Lying down.

About to die, that too.

Note: Sephy is not saying this.

That line was all Kraken, who is a doofy-looking octopus man in a robe. Come on, bro, it doesn't even fit.

Everything was going so well, too.

Today's boss: Kraken.

I hate Kraken.

Knowing he's weak to lightning, and still having a bunch of these from Castle Hein, I figure I'll just toss them and run through his (8,000) HP real quick-like.

The plan doesn't quite go off.

Jecht goes down before he can heal.

Golbez does this instead of anything useful.

Then Kraken wipes me, no effort-style.

Kraken is a fucker. I still remember fighting Kraken in my first run. He's brutal, compared to the earlier bosses, and a new player probably isn't expecting things like this. The only way to handle him is with levels, pretty much.

Or just by tossing a whole bunch of cloned Artic Winds you still have sitting around at him. I was going to do savestate stuff until Shadowflare came up two or three times and killed him, but it wasn't in the cards. It was a really boring fight.