Final Fantasy III Down, III to Go

 Yeah, the numerals are starting to get awkward.

Of the NES-era Final Fantasy games, I think I can safely say that III is my favorite, but it's not without its flaws.

Still, there are big things to recommend it: the Jobs system is, if nothing else, a cool aesthetic transformation. I think the fact that you only have four characters makes it slightly awkward. Furthermore, upon unlocking the Sage and Ninja jobs - the Ninja can equip all weapons and armor and the Sage can use all spells - has the unfortunate effect of basically rendering the rest of the jobs irrelevant in the last stretch of the game.

The other hiccup in the Jobs system is the tediousness of getting up to speed with a new job. Leveling a job requires you to take five total actions (which can include just "Defend") while in that job, but also cap at a single job level per encounter. This means that you might find yourself tempted to spend a long time in some low-level area hitting "defend" for five rounds and then wiping out the monsters, and repeating this ad nauseum.

There's a bit of push-pull I feel on the story. Unlike II, which went somewhat dark with its evil emperor conquering and massacring, this returned to four generic heroes (with the top-position character really being the "player character,") and a pretty standard "chosen one" story involving the restoration of four elemental crystals.

Still, there's definitely more here than in the first game, and some very cool concepts show up: for example, there are two world maps. You spend the first part of the game in a somewhat small world map, but when you reach the edge of it you discover that it's actually a continent floating high above the world. The world opens up a lot more after you leave here and restore the Water Crystal, which raises the sunken continents back to the surface and restores their people.

Also, crazily, you get four airships over the course of the game - the first is in a small valley that serves as the game's "kiddie pool," and you sacrifice that airship very quickly to destroy a boulder blocking the path. Then, you get another ship that is shot down over the city of Saronia (the series' first crack at a big city works by making it effectively four separate villages on the overworld map). You then can't leave the city until you deal with the evil advisor to the king, and in thanks, the crown prince gives you a speedier little ship that eventually gains the ability to convert into a submarine (though there are only a couple locations you need the sub to go to). The final ship is a big air-galleon that is my favorite, because it becomes a little mobile base, letting you resupply and rest anywhere you take it.

The final boss is a bit of a disappointment: the Cloud of Darkness just spams a giant AoE damage ability that more or less tests if your healer can spam Curaja every turn on the party (I miscalculated when I'd have to hit her with an Elixir to replenish her spell slots, which led to a kind of tempo-cycle where I could not revive and keep my top melee guy alive, so ironically I beat the game with everyone but the "face" of the party up).

One thing that shocks me is that apparently at no point until X, and then only in X, did the game use a normal freaking turn-based combat system. I through III use this thing where you have to queue up all of your characters' actions ahead of time (which sucks when you want to, say, revive someone and then heal them with a potion or buff them with Protection) whereas IV I believe introduces the "Active Time Battle" system, where you have to get fast at navigating those menus. Having gotten my start with Mario RPG, I'd always assumed that there were some Final Fantasy games that simply told you whose character's turn it was, let you select and action, and then had them immediately take that action. And given that X was my first Final Fantasy game, I assumed that that system was present in the other games (at least before XI's MMO and XII's move to their weird "gambit" system that I detested).

Anyway, I'll be curious to see how the SNES titles look and feel. The Pixel Remasters have, of course, made the old NES ones look like they were on the SNES, so I suspect there will be a less dramatic shift. I might consider going back to work on VII Rebirth's Hard Mode (I've just arrived at Cosmo Canyon in that run).

Hitting the Final Stretch of FFIII

 Having unlocked the Sage and the Ninja jobs, I think I must be near the end of Final Fantasy III (though I bet the final dungeon is massive). I acquired these in the Lost City of Eureka, which you need to complete a fairly intense dungeon just to unlock, and then another just to get into. Eureka also has a number of boss fights against what I'm given to understand are the ultimate weapons in the game.

My set-up going into the rest of the game is my tank character as a knight wielding Excalibur and Ragnarok, my Black and White Mages having done a little time as a Magus and Devout, respectively, are now both Sages, and I've got my fourth character (who has spent most of the game as a Black Belt) going Ninja, wielding Masamune and the Moonring Disk or whatever it's called.

While the Jobs are certainly the big innovation for III, the system is a little awkward - each time you unlock new classes, if you want to try them, you're kind of at square one. This feels pretty fair when it's a radical departure, like when you get the Ranger or the Thief or the Evoker, but when there are classes that are clearly meant to be upgrades to existing ones, such as the Magus for the Black Mage or the Summoner for the Evoker, it feels kind of crappy to start over at Job level 1, which I think can mean that your power dips a little.

Interestingly, when it comes to the Evoker and the Summoner, you use the same summoning spells, but the Evoker gets a random (though I think also contingent on the current state of battle) attack by their summon between two options - Ifrit might blast a single target with Hellfire or they might do an AoE heal on the party. But with the Summoner, all the summons just do one thing, which seems to always be an AoE damage ability - ones that will come to be their signature abilities like Shiva's Diamond Dust. (Also, for both classes, notably, other than the high-level summons that you need to beat in order to obtain, you actually get the same number of spell slots for each level above first. Thus, your Chocobo summon can fill the role of your cheap spell, but Shiva, Ramuh, Ifrit, and Titan are all basically equal in terms of your resources to cast them.)

Of course, we had class/job upgrades in the original Final Fantasy, but this was a single quest that just upgraded all four of your characters and it was a strict bonus - nothing to catch up on. You went from being a level whatever Black Mage to that same level Black Wizard.

There's a ton of fun to the flavor of these jobs, and I love how they start getting unique abilities (using the Monk's Kick could be pretty fun).

But overall, I think in these early days, the developers relied too much on the idea of grinding. That's, of course, something that game design has gotten better with (though I'll concede that as much as I love my Soulsborne games, I don't think I've ever played one in which I didn't try to do at least a little level grinding).

Anyway, the world of III is definitely more interesting than the previous two. The story's still not quite as interesting as later games would have (though I'll concede that I've got rose-colored glasses) but there are some really cool ideas here. My favorite is that the Invincible, the fourth airship you get (yeah, four of them!) function as your own little mobile town with a bed to sleep in for free, vending machines for items and lots of good weapons, armor, and spells, and if you're attacked by flying creatures on the Invincible, the battle starts with the ship barraging your foes with cannons, doing a modest but decent amount of damage to them. And you still have the Nautilus, the high-speed airship that can convert into a submarine.

Right now I'm trying to back out of what feels like the lead-up to the end of the game so that I can go find the Odin summon (I had gotten Bahamut and Leviathan, but missed Odin and was very disappointed when I got to the Sages at the end of Eureka and one of them said "hey, you've got to go get this other thing to get what I have to give you." That said, going through Eureka again should help me generate the funds to get better armor for my Ninja and possibly stock up on Shurikens (which are freaking expensive - I hope that means they're powerful).

MCDM's Evolving RPG

 So, I probably should have been a Patreon backer rather than a Backerkit one, given that I am curious about the nuts and bolts of development. As such, I'm only able to glean what changes are happening thanks to the MCDM YouTube page and Matt Colville's Twitter account.

In other words, the stuff I'm receiving here might be a bit off, but I'll try to comment one what I understand to be the latest developments in the game, and this is your invitation to take this big old grain of salt with it.

One of the changes that I'm not sold on is the change to damage ranges.

The RPG (which still lacks even a working name beyond "the MCDM RPG") famously eschews attack rolls. In combat, you simply do an amount of damage based on your rolls, and monsters do so against you. The idea is that you shouldn't hit that feeling of "cool, I just waited ten minutes to get a turn and I accomplished nothing."

This idea in and of itself is one I have largely positive feelings about - I've had those turns where I don't land a hit and it feels crappy (that said, using the Shield spell to give my Eldritch Knight an AC of 27 felt really good - but perhaps not so great for my DM). The only concern I have about that is the way that this creates constant bookkeeping - when an attack misses, it's an opportunity to not have to adjust a creature's HP.

The problem that the folks at MCDM were having, though, was that they had to give everything boats of HP because the damage flow was constant.

The other issue they had was that everyone was doing the same amount of damage - the game is (was) built around a 2d6 roll - the most common dice roll in all of gaming, not just RPGs (well, maybe 1d6 is) - and you'd add a modifier to that to get the damage you dealt. The 2d6 basically acted as the game's d20, but also as its damage rolls, and that led to a difficulty in distinguishing between abilities different classes had and even abilities within a class.

I know that in some earlier iteration of the game at least, you had boons and banes - adding or subtracting d4s to these rolls - and impact dice - adding or subtracting d8s - so you might, for example, have some less powerful ability that only added your Might to the roll but also built up some resource, and then you might spend a couple points of that resource to add an impact die or two, and perhaps add another stat as well. This certainly allowed for some variation, but I can imagine that it starts to get limited when you want new features and abilities to allow your character to hit the cap of level 10.

The new idea they're testing does something pretty significant: your roll no longer determines the damage you deal directly. Instead, each ability has a damage range - on 2d6, you might deal, say, 3 damage on a roll of 2-6, 5 damage on a roll of 7-12, and 7 damage on a roll of 13 or 14.

I see big upsides and big downsides to this solution.

The upside of course is that you can really dial in the power of these abilities. Maybe you want a really reliable if not terribly powerful attack - a "Tactical Strike" for the Tactician. You might make the damage ranges very close to one other - just 4, 5, or 6 damage, so whatever you roll is going to be reasonable but you're probably doing it mainly to gain resources or some other benefit. But then, maybe you have a "Chaos Burst" on your... Elementalist or something, and you could have a really broad range - dealing 5, 10, or 20 damage. You could adjust the ranges as well - maybe there's some ability where you're much more likely to do the middle damage amount but on a very low or very high roll you get these extreme results, or maybe there's an ability where you've got equal chances to deal its various amounts of damage.

The biggest downside, however, that I see is that this is going to crowd the character sheet like crazy. And I think it will require far greater mental investment to understand an ability. A 5E Fireball deals 8d6 damage in a 20-ft sphere. That's straight off the dome for me at this stage. But if I had to remember that it could do 14 damage if you rolls a 4 or lower on 2d6, 28 if you rolls 5-8, and 42 damage if you rolled 9 or higher... that's a lot of mental real estate.

 I suppose the question I have is this: why do we even need to have all of these abilities roll the same dice?

I get that you want to have a common selection of dice for your binary (boolean?) rolls, but if we're tossing out the attack roll, why do we even need to retain something like a d20 roll in combat?

Naturally, the removal of an attack roll in combat also removes the need for multiple attacks (sure, you'd like to have damage spill over if you down a foe, such as if you kill a monster with your first attack and then attack a second one - but that could be a particular attack or class of attacks) so you'll want these die rolls to go up as your character gets more powerful (I also think removing the notion of a generic attack in favor of class-based abilities - somewhat like in World of Warcraft where Paladins have Crusader Strike and Demon Hunters have Demon Bite - both of which are basic filler "this is to generate the resources for more interesting abilities" - gives you more leeway to change what dice you roll) but I don't see why we can't have fun with all the polyhedral dice that people have anyway.

If you want consistent, more predictable damage, you make something where you roll a bunch of d4s or d6s. If you want swingier damage, you use fewer but higher-capped dice. 2d6 has a bit of a bell curve where you're much more likely to roll a 7 whereas on a d12 no result is more likely than another.

Final Fantasy III's Jobs System

 I've begun (and, frankly, made significant progress through) Final Fantasy III.

If FFII chose to tell a darker story and eschew classes in favor of a gradual skill-based progression system, the third game in the entry seems to pull the ripcord and go in the utter opposite direction. Once again you have four characters from the start who don't really have any distinctive personality - the first character in your lineup simply speaks for the rest - and the story is once again about four elemental crystals and some kind of balance between light and darkness. Also, shockingly, spell slots are back.

When the game starts, the four party members are all "Onion Knights," which is apparently an idiomatic expression in Japanese referring to, essentially, "newbies." (I think it's kind of "green" like a green onion, roughly.) However, shortly after the game begins, you encounter the Air Crystal and unlock the first "jobs," aka classes. These are the Warrior, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage - five of the six options from the original game.

These jobs can be swapped between any time outside of combat, meaning that your characters can play different roles quite easily. Every five actions you take in combat, your "job level" with the current job that character has will level up (though I think you can never gain more than one job level per encounter - otherwise it would be tempting to go to a low-level area, have a Viking spam "draw attacks" and the rest of the party defend and just turn on the auto-battler and go get a sandwich).

What these job levels do... is something I don't entirely understand. Having had two of my characters stay as Black and White Mages for the vast majority of the game (I swapped the Black Mage briefly to a Geomancer) they've done a decent job accruing spell slots. My top-position character started as a Warrior with brief forays into Monk, then went Knight upon getting access to the second set of classes, and now I'm kind of swapping him between Viking, Dragoon, and Knight. My bottom-position character has swapped the most, starting as a Red Mage, then spending a lot of time as a Black Belt.

I think what it does is A: improve the kind of thing that the class is supposed to be good at and B: determines which stats improve as you level up.

I'm not sure if this is a game where you can kind of trap yourself with bad choices - the wisdom I've seen online is that you should feel free to swap jobs whenever you want. One thing I'll caution is that if you swap from a spellcasting class to a non-spellcaster, you'll lose your spell slots and not get them back when you switch again.

Plot-wise there's definitely more going on than the first game, though it's not a huge leap from the story of the second game. One thing I greatly appreciate is that there are somewhat fewer random encounters, but they're also a little more challenging (which was a big note I had for the second game).

The biggest downside is that I think this game encourages (and maybe requires) a lot of grinding. The first game maybe needed some near the Marsh Cave early on, but I felt quite powerful about a third of the way into the game. Here, not only is the experimental nature of the Jobs something that will encourage you to grind a lot to try them out, but also, maintaining equipment for all of your jobs will drain your gil like nobody's business. A dungeon I went into recently seemed designed to kill my White Mage, but with generous use of Phoenix Downs I pushed my way through.

Swapping jobs will automatically equip you with "optimal" gear, but sometimes this can be a little counter-productive. For example, the Viking class, if you use it for its "Draw Attacks" feature (which admittedly seemed to work far better when I first got it - I wonder if its chance to succeed improves as you level the class) it could be reasonable for you to dual-wield shields, but in my experience, the game always has you dual-wield weapons (now, granted, I think Vikings get such serious damage reduction that you might still be fine dual-wielding - as long as the attacks are physical, I basically always take just 1 damage).

Another slight annoyance is that some jobs you get aren't really "online" when you get them. For example, Invokers (or is it Evokers?) are the first job to introduce summoning to the game, with folks like Shiva, Ifrit, and Ramuh making their debuts in the series, but you don't actually have access to any of the summoning spells when you get the class. Likewise, while the Dark Knight claims that it can wield boomerangs and swords, it seems that the actual selection of weapons they have is far more limited - and at least at the point I'm at, I can't find a single one of them.

Still, overall, I've been really enjoying this one. The world is far bigger - after you explore much of what you'd expect is the world map, you discover that it's actually a floating continent, and there's a whole second world map below. I've also been through three airships, and have started getting hints about a fourth one. The current one can go underwater (though there's not been a ton of underwater stuff to explore other than a dungeon).

What I've heard is that V expands upon the introduced Job system seen here and does it better. I'll have to wait and see that, but I do really love that non-spellcasters are starting to get more interesting abilities.

II Down, IV to Go

 Well, that's another Final Fantasy game beaten.

While I have a vague, if underdeveloped, interest in maybe revisiting the original Final Fantasy to try out the Thief and Red Mage classes, this is a game that, to be honest, I'm glad to see in the rear view mirror.

And the reason for that is almost purely mechanical: it all came to a head in the final boss fight.

When I reached the Emperor in the depths of hell (yeah, there wasn't a lot of particularly ambitious worldbuilding in the early days, though I will say II has more of a coherent story than the original) I discovered too late that because my Berserk spell and my Basuna spell and my Haste spell were not high enough, I could basically only do damage with Firion wielding Masamune and Maria pelting him with Ultimas - each of these landing for pitiful damage, but at least some at all. Thus, Guy and Leon were basically useless. And then, the Emperor cast Slow on Firion, meaning that he was now doing precisely zero damage.

I still won - I didn't have any total wipes the whole time I played. But that final boss felt like trying to knock down a brick wall with a pool noodle.

Plot-wise, though, II introduces some elements to the series that will become staples: we have an evil empire, and even a subversion in that a new villain rises up to replace the emperor (only for that to be doubly subverted when the emperor returns from death to become the main villain once again).

Over the course of the game, the fourth character slot becomes a home for a rotating cast of characters, most of whom meet grim fates. There are recurring villains - not that they have a ton of personality, but when you find the zombified version of an arrogant airship captain in Pandemonium Palace, it feels pretty satisfying to take him down.

But overall, the progression system really holds this one back. Likewise, even if the series eventually moves on from classes (or "jobs") I actually could have used a clear pointer of what each character was meant to be best at - I found myself giving Maria all the magic stuff, so she wound up having to carry the party. Guy I made a dual-wielding heavy-hitter, kind of a Barbarian, which was great in 99% of situations until I hit that final boss and he couldn't deal nearly any damage.

Anyway.

The game is certainly a step up in difficulty, though I think that is, again, kind of the fault of the progression system. Combat, like in the first game, is turn-based and has you enter all of your party's commands at the top of a round, then executing those commands in a randomized order (there are stats like Agility that don't seem to have any explanation). Once again, the damage of an attack is strongly tied to the number of hits that you make, and I think this is directly tied to your skill in that kind of weapon - for example, if you have a skill of five in swords, by default when you attack with a sword you'll do 5 attacks (these are all compounded into a single damage number, like they were in the first game). You can also equip a weapon in each hand, which causes your character to attack with each of them on their turn (I don't know exactly how or even if there's much of a damage penalty to doing this). Damage, I feel, is a lot swingier in this game than in the previous one.

Spells are all leveled up individually, but unlike in I, you just get a single spell of each element: your Fire spell will upgrade gradually as you cast it. And there's no distinction between single-target and multi-target spells (which I think continue on into later games,) so you can simply select to the far left to target every monster, or far right to target the whole party. The damage then gets split between the targets.

I suspect that the defense system is subtractive, as, unless the monster has a serious vulnerability to a type of damage, you'll often see pretty pitiful damage when you spread it across the battlefield as opposed to hitting a single target - like, less damage than you'd get if you divided the damage of a single-target spell. This, of course, makes the necessity of hitting as hard as possible really important (and why the final boss was such a slog for me).

I got through the game with little grinding - other than a period in which I had a petrified Guy and would draw out fights to cast Esuna on him over and over.

Oh, also, the distinction between Esuna and Basuna was a pain - Esuna only clears status ailments that persist beyond combat, an Basuna only clears those that end at the end of combat. Why these need to be separate spells? I guess I should get in a time machine and complain.

I'm eager to try the third game, which I understand to be the one to introduce "Jobs," Final Fantasy's more easily-swappable version of character classes. I think I'm going to read up on how to prepare for that game because I think my party wasn't really put together well in II (if I had to do it again, and I probably won't, I'd dedicate one of the core 3 to being a Black Mage, one to being a White Mage, and the third to being pure physical damage dealing. And I'd be casting Berserk every freaking combat.)

The Dark Place and Time

 If you squint, you can start to put together a timeline for the events of Alan Wake II.

I hadn't really caught this on my first go-around, nor even when playing through the Final Draft. But there's a chain of causality that connects the live-action scenes following each of Alan's journeys through the Dark Place version of his and Alice's apartment and subsequent horror within the Writer's Room.

But maybe we need to talk about layers first.

Final Fantasy II's Mixed Evolution

 In my project to play through the original six Final Fantasy games (the Pixel Remaster versions, so not the "real" versions, I suppose) it's been kind of enlightening to see how the series started and has developed.

The first game, of course, as I've said before, is almost a "proof of concept." You start the game with a full party you'll have for the entirety, and the four characters don't really have any personality - just four plucky heroes show up with crystals to fix the world. You fight monsters and gain XP, and as you gain XP, you level up, with various stats going up based on the class you're playing. Evidently, it's best to "upgrade" your class by completing the quest for Bahamut as soon as you can, because this improves the rate at which your stats improve with each level.

Now, I'd always been aware that Final Fantasy games tend to reinvent themselves with each entry. Even if there are lots of familiar aesthetics and overall structures to combat (at least in early days,) you go from equipping Magicite in VI to using Materia in VII, and then something called the "Junction" system in VIII that I haven't really wrapped by head around (I haven't played any version of that).

What I hadn't really realized was that this reinvention happened from the very start - II's leveling system works very differently than the first game's.

Indeed, one of the common distinctions between RPG styles is the "class based" and "skill based" system. In a class-based RPG, you pick a character class when you start, and that basically shapes the way that your character progresses. There might be choices to make, and in something like D&D, you can multiclass, but the classes are basically a full kit of capabilities that you can feel pretty confident you'll have access to as you level up.

In skill-based RPG systems, there's far more granular control over how the character develops. And you can mix and match skills to your heart's content. The price you pay is that this often blurs the lines between classes. If everyone can pick up the same fire spells, your Lavamancer isn't going to be all that different from your Dragon Knight.

Still, the best of these games can make these choices feel like big ones. I'm a big fan of Elden Ring, and that's a game where even my Intelligence and a bit of Strength character feels very distinct from my Dexterity/Intelligence character. That's due in large part, I think, to how the different weapons and spells in that game can feel very different.

It's a little backwards to think of Final Fantasy II's leveling system as being "like Elder Scrolls" given that the first Elder Scrolls game came out six years after Final Fantasy II, but in terms of my experience, I played my first Elder Scrolls game about 18 years ago (it was Oblivion) and am just getting to know this one.

Indeed, I think Elder Scrolls is the better comparison than Elden Ring and its Souls-like predecessors, because unlike Elden Ring, in both Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy II, you only level up a skill by using it.

This can actually introduce some frustrations, and I think the clearest is that of Esuna.

Esuna is a classic FF spell that clears status effects. In Rebirth, you get this from a "Cleansing Materia" that starts out only with "Poisona," which, you guessed it, clears Poison (ironically, the "Poison Materia" that actually lets you inflict poison on foes lets you get the Bio, Bioa, and Bioga spells, which do what you'd probably guess a spell called Poison would do). After you've leveled up that Materia, it unlocks the Esuna spell, which clears basically all status debuffs.

Esuna exists in Final Fantasy II, as well as an alternate version called Basuna - the former clears effects that will persist beyond the battle in which they are inflicted, while the latter clears those that will naturally clear up after a fight is over. In other words, Esuna is probably the more important spell to have.

In II, you can find tomes to teach your characters spells - they can learn up to 16 spells, but there aren't like "higher level" versions of these tomes. The spells level up when you cast them enough times So, Fire becomes Fire II, Fire III, Fire IV, etc. (and in the pixel remaster at least, the visuals get upgraded at certain levels). For damage spells and healing spells and buffs and such, it's all pretty reasonable - you deal more damage the higher level the spell is. The spells actually also get more expensive the higher level they are, but casting spells will also increase your total MP, so it doesn't seem to be too punishing to get any spells particularly high.

It does, however, make leveling up a new spell quite difficult - I got Holy for one of my characters, and it's just pathetic compared to her Fire spells. There might be some other mechanics I don't totally understand (I don't know if Black and White magic have different stats associated with them - instead I just have one character who seems to be the best at all magic).

But when it comes to Esuna... boy.

Because Esuna's use is not numerical, the only way it grows stronger is that it becomes capable of curing more and more serious ailments. Now, you can level up some spells outside of combat - Cure, the main healing spell (the only healing spell?) will improve even if used between fights, but I think you can only cast it when a character it's targeting is below their max health. That's a pretty common situation, though, so it's fine.

Esuna, when cast out of combat, can only be cast on a character with a status ailment. And only one that it can, at its current level, cure.

Are you seeing the problem?

See, I was playing earlier today and Guy, one of the three permanent party members (at least so far, but I'm pretty far into the game) got petrified. I had Gold Needles if I needed them, but I wanted to get Maria's Esuna spell powerful enough to cure it.

And it was like level 1.

So, pretty much the only way I could do this was to do so in battle. Esuna would "Miss" when it hit Guy, but behind the scenes, the little progress tracker would tick forward and gradually get Esuna closer to leveling up. Outside of combat, I couldn't cast the spell on him because it wasn't powerful enough to clear the debuff.

Very, very slowly, fighting Black Flans and Red Jellies or whatever they were called, killing all but one to have it drain my party's HP as slowly as I could, I'd cast this spell over and over to no avail, hoping that when I decided I'd done it enough, I'd see the spell level up on the victory screen.

I had to get the spell to level 6 - with an understanding that I think even my most-used spells will probably be around 10 when I finish the game.

This is... this is not a great way to do things.