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.

Final Fantasy II's Elder-Scrolls-like Progression System

 In my hubristic quest to play through the first six (at least) Final Fantasy games, I've now begun Final Fantasy II. From the get-go, we've got more of a plot, and an element that is going to be a mainstay of the series: the evil empire. Our heroes, now given names and a hint of personality and backstory, are young orphans trying to aid the resistance against the empire, aiding the exiled princess and dying king of their homeland.

Mechanically, there's a big change: characters don't have classes nor even levels - instead, each time you use something, be it a spell or a weapon or even just "getting hit" you gradually build up a meter that will level it up.

This means that, technically, your characters can play any role, though their starting stats might push you in one direction or another. Indeed, now that I think about this, I feel a little bad for going with the gender conventions and making the female character the spellcaster.

This type of leveling is...

Ok, to be frank, I don't love it.

It's very similar to the Elder Scrolls series, where you totally "level by doing." The problem is that every single spell works this way - if you want your Esuna to get better (though I don't even really know what it means to "be better" other than potentially being less likely to fail?) you need to cast it over and over. This will likely mean doing so a lot out of combat (I hope that it even works that way) on perfectly healthy characters (I hope that it even works that way). Spells get more expensive as you level them - one MP per spell level - but you also gain more MP by spending MP.

I think this works in a game like Elder Scrolls because there are so many ways to play a game like that (I had a friend who didn't do any quests - he just hunted animals to make better and better hide and leather armor). But here it feels a little like I need to be careful not to let any of my skills fall behind. This also means casting a lot more spells, which meant when I got to the first boss I had barely any MP left - ironically I had to make my melee characters do most of the spellcasting.

Another change, and one that is probably welcome but also comes with consequences, is that the same spell can target a single target or multiple, but it appears to be divided between the targets or at least take a penalty. I don't think I'm going to get a "Fira" because I think Fire will just level up to Fire 2 and Fire 3, etc., and you can just select all the enemies to cast it as an AOE.

Another oddity is that, while there's more plot and dialogue, I also think the game does a worse job of giving you a sense of where to go. In the first game, it's actually pretty hard to blunder into areas that are too high-level for you because of the way that it restricts movement (and by the time you have the airship, the overworld is basically all of an appropriate level for you). Here, though, I went a little too far west and had Guy get one-shot by an Adamantoise, and later got both him and Firion killed by a group of ghosts (luckily, this go around resurrections are free at the temples).

It also appears that the fourth character slot is more or less for temporary party members. Firion, Maria, and Guy so far seem to be permanent, but I've had a couple people pop in and out in that fourth slot.

As will tend to be the case going forward, the characters have unique sprites, rather than the basic ones provided by their classes (I know the iconic Black Mage with the shadowed face will show up again - at least in the Pixel Remaster, they're still the spell vendors - gone are separate stores for white and black magic).

Anyway, I'm only a couple hours in, and now seem to be working on destroying the Dreadnought - the Empire's airship that has bombarded all the friendly cities and left big craters in them.

Ultimate Party Animal

 Well, the patch to fix the "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" side-quest in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has landed. I had to re-attain the record for G-Bike, which led to a Queen's Blood game followed by a final 3D Brawler match (well, not so final - beating the Shinra Middle Manager unlocks a fight versus Sephiroth in it).

However, it turns out that this quest did not hold the last bit of party XP required to hit party level 10 for me.

For that, I first had to beat the Gears and Gambits games in Cosmo Canyon on hard mode - something I had zero shame in looking up a guide for - and then doing the same with Fort Condor (which... I also looked up a guide for. Look, RTSes have never been my strong suit).

However, that still wasn't enough. Because I've now got to do the Cactuar Crush... you guessed it, hard modes.

This should finish it - after beating the first one, I have 15 XP left to hit party level 10, and each awards 5 XP, so I just have these three challenges left.

Once all that is accomplished, I'll continue my Hard Mode playthrough (in this case the overall game's hard mode). I believe the last party level unlocks a feature on everyones' Folios that causes them to fill the limit gauge (I assume partially fill it, otherwise it'd be utterly busted) with each expenditure of ATB. We'll see how much it does that, but getting more Limit Breaks over the course of a difficult boss fight is sure to be useful.

We'll see if I actually make it all the way through on Hard Mode. I've been loving this game, but I now have an ambition to clear all the old-school Final Fantasy games I got (as I said in the previous post, I just beat the first one).

Still, being able to check the Ultimate Party Animal title off the list certainly feels good.

Also, upon returning to Hard Mode (which I should be able to now - I didn't want to do it in the middle of the side quest for fear of losing my progress) I can get the materials to make the Genji gear, which I think I could put to good use (the one that reduces incoming and outgoing damage might be really powerful on Barret, as I've already got him set up to tank with Lifesaver and the gun with the automatic protect spell every time he overcharges).

Final Fantasy I Down, V to Go

 I've now finished the original Final Fantasy in its PS5 (maybe PS4) "Pixel Remaster" version.

Like a lot of NES-era games, this feels kind of like a proof of concept. I know the Pixel Remaster has a few tweaks to make the game a little more like its later counterparts - Phoenix Down, for example, did not exist in the original, so the only way to revive a party member was to go to a town temple and have a priest resurrect them, or to use the Life spell. What I wonder, though, is whether Ether was also a later edition. Being able to restore your casters' spell slots mid-dungeon absolutely made the game easier, and I think it would be a lot more challenging (and frankly, tedious) if you couldn't re-up your Firagas, Holies, and Flares.

My party composition was only slightly changed from the default - I replaced the Thief with a Monk. My Monk, Jador, was a little slow to get up to speed, and was certainly less durable than my warrior, Coran, but once he got to the point where the Iron Nunchaku wasn't any better than his unarmed attacks, he kind of took off, and only when I was able to get Coran some really amazing weapons like Excalibur or Masamune (the latter only available in the final dungeon, and the former basically right before it) could he keep up.

In terms of difficulty, the game feels way easier than other titles. I don't know if this is due to some rebalancing or if, simply, as someone who grew up on JRPGs, the strategies are second nature to me at this point. Even the major bosses, the four Fiends, seemed to only last 3-4 rounds, whereas any other fight rarely took more than two.

Indeed, the only time I felt genuinely threatened was when facing off against Chaos, the game's final boss. Even then, the fight went relatively smoothly - I kept Haste and Temper up on the two melee characters, used Protera and Invisira to increase the party's defenses (not sure what the damage would have been like without them) and once I had everything up and running (occasionally re-casting Haste as Chaos would cast Slow on some characters) I'd spam Flare. This was the first fight in which my White Wizard Kula felt like she had to be healing more often than not, but with 8 or 9 spell slots at each level, it wasn't hard to spam Healga or whatever it was called.

I think if I were to redesign this, I might make enemy encounters about three times less frequent and about three times more difficult. Until you get the airship, there's no way to travel across the map without encountering monsters about every five steps. So, you get fight after fight after fight in which the battle music barely even plays before you've either obliterated the monsters with quick attacks or a single big spell. Pretty early on, my melee characters were almost guaranteed to one-shot any non-boss enemy they hit, except for the odd ooze that didn't much physical damage.

This is also the old-school quest design in which the only clue to where you should go next tends to be a single NPC in a single town somewhere on the map - I will confess here that I did look up online guides, for example, to make sure that I got the class upgrades as soon as I could. This did result in me accidentally almost skipping Mt. Gulg - I was about to start the Wind Palace before realizing I could have gone to the Mt. Gulg as soon as I had acquired the canoe, so it was an exercise in utterly massacring every monster that popped up - even my Wizards could generally melee them down.

While this entry in the series feels strangely sparse in terms of story, I can also see how players back in 1987 (when I was a year old) must have felt like this was the closest they could get to playing D&D as a video game. It's certainly not ambiguous that the folks at Squaresoft were basically taking elements whole-cloth from D&D - the bestiary is more or less just the D&D Monster Manual, and the game even uses D&D's "Vancian Magic" system, where you have different pools of magic for each level of spell. Mind you, I'm not even that fond of that system in D&D itself, and here it's even more awkward. (I'm a 5E native, so I don't know if "upcasting" was allowed back in the day - it's not in FF1). The four major bosses prior to the final boss are the Lich, the Marilith, the Kraken, and Tiamat, which are all legendary monsters except the Marilith (and Tiamat is actually a goddess whose avatars can be fought in 5E - there's a straight Tiamat stat block for her as the final boss of a big adventure that lists her as a fiend, but a more recent book with an "Aspect" of her that has her as a dragon, which I think seems more appropriate). 

One of the oddities of the game is that it sort of suddenly develops a plot when you confront the final boss - the reveal that there's a whole time loop, and that the rebel knight Garland somehow got sent back in time to become Chaos, who then sent the four fiends forward into the future to ensure he is transported into the past.

Really, the time travel aspect of the game kind of comes out of nowhere.

While the game is largely traditional fantasy, with elves and dwarves and dragons, there is a little hint at the technological aspects that would become far more prominent starting in VI, which is that a fallen civilization built this floating fortress, and some of the monsters you fight in it are clearly robots.

Anyway, next I'll be starting up II and see where that one takes me. My total play time for this was about 13 hours - piddling for a modern Final Fantasy game (Rebirth took me about 100 hours to complete, which did include all the World Intel and all but the last sidequest - still waiting on the patch to fix that one). I'm expecting that the duration will grow with later entries, especially when we get to the SNES games (which I think start with IV).

Going Old School with Final Fantasy I

 Well, the JRPG kick has officially gone into overdrive. I've purchased the Pixel Remaster bundle of Final Fantasies I-VI for my PS5. I've heard, admittedly, mixed reviews of these remakes, but it seems a good way to get to experience these classic games.

I've played a few hours of the original Final Fantasy, and it's interesting to see the way things started off. As a disclaimer, the Pixel Remaster actually makes the game look more like it's from the SNES era than its original NES incarnation. The character sprites would fit in reasonably with Locke, Celes, and Terra (and Crono) and the battle screen is pretty similar to 6.

There are some oddities, though: the text and text boxes are not at all pixelated in the same way. And the music seems fully orchestrated (or if not, done with really impressive modern synthesizers).

Final Fantasy games are, of course, known for their complex plots and compelling characters. But boy howdy had they not really figured that part out yet. The four party members are all there from the start and have no canonical names (I've named them after deities from my homebrew D&D setting) and you can pick between their classes when you start the game. The default is Warrior, Thief, White Mage and Black Mage. I swapped out the Thief for a Monk - I know eventually I'm supposed to unequip the monk's weapon, but I think I'm not quite at that point yet. Anyway, you can also have a Red Mage, which I think is a little bit like a Bard in D&D in that it gets a little of everything.

"Plot" wise, so far at least the game is a pretty boilerplate series of nested quests. I fought the rogue knight (who, spoiler alert, winds up coming back as the final boss of the game) to rescue the princess of Cornelia, which then got the king to have a bridge built so that I could go to a town, beat up some pirates, take their ship, sail to Elfheim, where the prince was stuck in a cursed slumber. So I check out some ruins where the "elf king" says he's trapped unless he can get his crown back, which sends me into a pretty intense dungeon in the marshes. I fight some legally-not-mind-flayers to get the crown, bring it back to the king, he turns out to be the dark elf king who cursed the prince in the first place, but when I kill him, I get this crystal eye back. So I bring that eye to a friendly blind witch I'd encountered earlier and she gives me a "Jolt Potion," which, when brought back to the prince, wakes him up. He now gives me a "Mystic Key" that opens a massive number of doors across the world I've encountered, and will presumably allow me to progress further (though I know of a few locations I'll want to use that key in, including the deepest part of that pretty intense dungeon in the marsh that I'd gotten the crown in).

Gameplay-wise, you basically get a random encounter every time you take your fifth step. Combat is sort of turn-based. You actually enter all of your party's commands at the same time - a sort of "top of the round" moment, but the order in which they go is somewhat randomized (I think there's some stat like speed or agility that governs it.) Thus, if you are set to attack a monster that's already been killed, you wind up defaulting to whatever the game would point you to first. I think there was a similar idea in Chrono Trigger (minus the "queueing up all the turns at once" idea).

Fascinatingly, the Mages' spellcasting actually works a bit like D&D - you have a certain number of MP for each level of spell (but you can't up-cast lower-level spells). Each Mage can learn up to three spells of any given level, and will need to "forget" them to learn others in that slot. Generally, I've found that it's best to be conservative with spells (not unlike in D&D) which does, unfortunately, lead you to kind of just spamming the "attack" action on all of your characters, with the Mages usually doing very minor damage.

As with so many games from the 1980s, and particularly those that were the first entry in what is now a long-running, beloved series, there's a lot of elements here that feel like more of a proof-of-concept than what we'd expect of a full game.

Still, obviously it was innovative enough to launch one of gaming's biggest franchises, and they'd continue to revise and reform their design philosophy.

Three hours in (I believe) I think I've explored nearly half the map, so I'm not expecting this to take the amount of time I usually expect a Final Fantasy game to do (I think I beat Rebirth at the hundred-hour mark).

And I'll be curious to see when the games start really feeling like the fully-formed versions of themselves. Before today, the oldest Final Fantasy game I'd played was VI.