Final Fantasy III Part #52 - Part Fifty-Two: Blehh. Bleurgh.

Part 52: Part Fifty-Two: Blehh. Bleurgh.

Part Fifty-Two: Blehh. Bleurgh.

Well, here we are. All the non-Mognet sidequests are done and nothing is left in the story except climbing the Crystal Tower and fighting the last bosses.

Boy is this gonna be a slog.

Listen to the music while I slog through the place:

First thing of note: everything is a palette swap of something else. I mean, once you've made an asset, if you don't use it twice, y'know, that's pretty fuckin' wasteful, isn't it? I can think of two examples in the whole game of something that doesn't come back as something else later.

(Azer here is a recolour of the Djinn from way back at the start of the game, if you're wondering.)

Of course, like everything else in the later parts of the game, enemies tend to act twice and have some special ability or another blah blah blah they're all the damn same anyway, whatever.

About the only thing of note regarding enemies in the Crystal Tower is that they have a bunch of HP. Azer here has 17,560.

Like most bosses, HP is the only thing enemies have going for them and they're boring to fight, but not a real challenge - keep your health up and you'll win the damage race. Occasionally something might poison you or get a lucky hit, but fights shouldn't take long to win.

In the NES version, more enemies had access to instant kills and petrification, plus they tended to come in larger groups, which meant that random encounters were a lot more dangerous.

The Crystal Tower is also full of treasure.

Most of it is boring, and it won't hurt you to skip it.

Blucks here are useful for level grinding if you want: they can summon an enemy called Kum Kum over and over, so if you just off those and keep the Blucks around, you can gain a bunch of experience if you do that for half an hour or more.

Other than that, they're weak and take more time to show up on screen than they do to die. I think Bluck and Kum Kum are the only monsters in this place with under 10,000 HP.

By the time you get to the Crystal Tower, you should have better attack options than Flare or Holy. The Chocobo's Wrath item would be useful, I suppose, since Flare is fairly well hidden away and you might be using a Magus that could use the extra power. The White Musk has the same problem as Holy the spell; by the time you get it, you don't really need it.

Oh, here's Green Medusa, in case you were thinking you'd never see her again.

Gomory almost kills Kuja, just by focussing on her in battle.

This is a different fight. Status magic isn't very useful in this game - not only does it not kill enemies, it doesn't hit very often. In my opinion, most RPGs have this problem - status magic is just a waste in random encounters, and bosses are mostly immune to it anyway, so why bother?

Gomory's spell is Drain. Besides Lightning, Drain is pretty much the most dangerous spell we've seen in the entire game.

Here, it gets Kuja killed. This is why you keep your health up.

It's also why you make sure you have Arise and a spare MP for it. Never lock yourself out of Arise, healing is the Devout's main thing and not being able to heal with one is dumb as hell, come on.

You know, high encounter rates make getting treasures like this pretty damn disappointing.

Anyway, to move on, we want this door, which is kind of out of the way.

When I first played this game, I didn't remember anything about the character models, but in the screens I notice their facial expressions and stuff; they're kind of nice.

They give a little bit of character to the kids, like the fact that Golbez always stands with his arms crossed because he's an uptight ass.

Anyway, yes, we have managed to open a door, because we are heroes and shit.

We are not almost there. Lotta boring crap still left to do.

On the other side of the door, I find a treasure chest.

It has a Fuma Garb in it! Fuma Garb is the best armour for the Thief, and it boosts Agility and Vitality by 3 each.

This is what happens when you only have a handful of equipment in your game. I like a final dungeon that gives you cool ultimate weapons, personally. I can forgive random chests because at least then I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by skipping them.

Oh, hey, Doga's Clone. It makes a pair with Unei's Clone from the Maze.

Who cares?

The Crystal Tower is a pretty long dungeon, honestly.

It's also full of fuckin' ninjas! Shit!

Well, technically, they're Shinobis.

Shinobis' attacks can poison ya, so be careful I guess? Poison shows up on a bunch of attacks in this game, but it's kind of weakened by being tied to turn instead of time, so it's not much of a threat - you can either end a fight before it's a big problem or just cover the little bit of extra damage with normal healing.

Elixir. When I was younger, I'd always save these kinds of things up for a rainy day, but now whenever I play an RPG, I use them pretty freely. Of course, they see a lot of use in this game since they're the only item that restores MP.

Oh, here's the Kum Kums that Blucks summon, in case you were wondering.

Kum Kums are like damn tissue paper and they die like chumps.

Their EXP drops aren't that impressive, either - if you want to level grind these guys, you have to kill a bunch of them. The only reason it's even a valid idea is that they can show up infinitely in one battle, so you don't have to run around for another enemy.

Why can you not buy these, again?

There's a big circular hole all the way up the tower around where the entrance to The Forbidden Land, Eureka sits on the ground floor.

Oh, and another Elixir.

It's also around this point that I started having Golbez summon Leviathan on random encounters. He'll have to eat an Elixir before I fight any bosses anyway, so I might as well use up his MP.

Stairs are fun! More stairs = more fun!

I kind of like the tileset for this dungeon. I don't know why someone would build a crystal tower, but it's kind of pretty at least.

Oh, yeah, the next floor has a long winding hallway that slows you down. No real dead ends or anything, just a lot of zig-zagging.

I hope you also like the tileset of this game.

I also hope you like stairs, because looking through the LPix gallery, I think I took a shot of every single fuckin' staircase in this place.

Every.

Goddamned.

One.

Also, every Phoenix Down.

Secret Passage. The use of secret passages is the most confusing part of this game's dungeons to me. What's gained by not just having a regular walkway?

I may never know.

In case you'd forgotten, back attacks are pretty dangerous in this game.

Never stick them out. Just run.

Bam, staircase!

Stairs!

To keep going in the tower, you have to go up to that floor, then come down so you can circle around and go back up again. The Resident Evil school of architecture.

Here's another picture of Sephy climbing stairs. I don't know why this one exists.

I mean, there's a treasure right there. There's no reason that I had to make a record of that stair climb, but I did.

Honestly, I don't remember this game having this many Phoenix Downs and Elixirs. Of course, I had 99 Elixirs the first time I played the game since I did a lot of grinding on enemies that drop 'em.

Oh look, Purple Goldor showed up for the party. This is Platinal, named of course for Platinum, the purple metal.

Platinal has, uh, I dunno, a gimmick? A feature?

He doesn't have a lot of cash on hand, that's for sure. How about you take your shitty corpse and go get me some bread from your stupid purple mansion, asshole?

Just for fun, I decided to see what Jecht can do with Holy.

Mystery solved: not very damn much. This is the problem endemic to attack magic in this game. Holy is one of the most powerful spells in the game, and it's way the hell behind the curve for damage by now. Summons barely get a pass on this by virtue of hitting all enemies without reducing power. Truth be told, if you want the highest raw damage you can get, you want four physical attackers and one healer.

Oh, but forget all that, here's an Elixir! That makes what, a million? Two million?

We are finally, finally almost at the top of the tower.

You can tell because there's something in the middle, instead of just a giant hole.

So let's get in there!

Wow.

Here's the General's palette swap, the Dark General.

That's not a joke.

Dark Generals are notable for having Phoenix Downs as an uncommon drop, so I guess you could farm them if you somehow didn't have enough from just opening chests.

In a continuation of my series "experimenting with White Magic", I have Jecht cast Tornado, which lowers an enemy's HP to a single digit. This would be useful if it weren't a level 8 spell, and if Jecht didn't go last all the time, leaving the enemy a chance to attack before the second round, which it wouldn't survive anyway. Amazing!

Past that is another zig-zag hallway.

You zig, and you zag.

And at the end, you get to go down some stairs, which I think we'll all agree is the real prize in Final Fantasy III.

Oh, and Sephy hit Job Level 99!

Moving on, let's go UP some stairs for a change!

(Seriously, like, every one. I don't understand it.)

New floor, new treasures!

And new enemies, like this Glasya Labolas.

He double-taps Sephy and then dies so quickly I didn't get a chance to cast Life!

Crystal Mail is the best there is, but Kuja is the only character in my party that can wear it and she already is.

Oh, hey, here's Doga's Clone casting Quake.

Here's a demonstration of what high Mind and Protect Rings do to elemental magic attacks. Golbez and Jecht almost can't be killed by them, but they're ugly for Sephy and Kuja. Keep this in mind, maybe.