I can stop eating Gysahl Greens any time I want. Not like mister “dude, can I like crash on your couch just for tonight? Won’t even know I’m there” there. That was A WEEK AGO, CHOCO-BRO.
Our adventures in FF3 continue…
Dislike: Mini
Final Fantasy III seems to take some kind of obscene pleasure in making the party take on odd conditions to proceed. There’s a couple, but the one I hate most is MINI. This spell, which has to be cast on everyone to make them smaller, and again to make them bigger, turns your party into useless clods. Sure, magic still works, but guess what, I only have one party member with black magic skills. So mostly I am just running away. I did find that I could just un-MINI everyone once they were past the MINI check, but that just takes more spell slots, or liberal use of mallets. Ouch. We were almost killed BY A RAT.
A terrible sea serpent was terrorizing the coast. We met a pirate viking-doing-pirate-cosplay who said he would do anything if we would just defeat the monster, even give us his ship. Which… okay. Sure. We mini’d up, crawled through the eye-socket of a sea serpent statue, found the missing eye (rat had it), came back, THROUGH the eye tunnel, placed the eye back in its socket and WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE.
The gem was larger than the eye socket. HOW DID WE DRAG IT THROUGH THE SMALLER TUNNEL?
Checkmate, Squenix.
Anyway, with the eye returned, the Klepto Dragon told us a tale of a gigantic earthquake that transformed the land and sank the four crystals that sustain the world.
Our adventures soon brought us to a tall tower (that we had to become frogs to enter… for reasons…). This tower, apparently, is how the continent we’re on manages to float above the surface of the world and WHAT, WE’RE ON A FLOATING CONTINENT? Okay, news flash.
By this time, I’d settled on the initial jobs for the characters. I’d switched from Red Mage to Warrior at this point. Red Mage does have some unique weapons — there were times when I used the job to cut down undead with the Wightbane, but in the end, I just needed someone who could stand at the front of the party and soak hits.
The monk is a little less powerful than its FF1 counterpart, in that its power doesn’t rise exponentially as long as it wields nothing and wears no gear. FF3 monks wield weapons and wear gear. They are still a potent single target physical force, perfect for boss fights.
I’m a little disappointed that AE attacks aren’t really a thing, yet.
Our friend remembers that he is the Ancient in charge of this tower, so after Medusa dies and the tower is still exploding, he sacrifices himself to the tower, fixes it, teleports us out, and then dies.
But, our work wasn’t done. We still had to restore the Fire Crystal, which was held by the dwarves. Thankfully, we didn’t have to MINI ourselves to lali-ho with the dwarves, but they were having their own little crisis. A creature named Gutso had stolen one of their two treasured Horns of Ice. We tracked Gutso down and defeated them, but it turned out that was just a feint. When the dwarfs dropped the force field protecting the other Horn so we could replace the second one next to it, Gutso popped back up and stole the other.
The power turned them into Salamander! And then we killed them. The monk took one for the team… but was soon back in fighting shape.
The fire crystal bestowed new jobs upon us. My Warrior became a Knight. Ally’s White Mage became a Scholar (they fight and heal with items — too bad there’s not any place to buy damaging items, yet). Drew’s Monk remained a Monk. Tom’s Black Mage mostly stayed as a Black Mage, BUT — since he was largely using a bow to kill trash to save magic, I eventually had him become a Ranger most of the time. For awhile, though, the BLM job was still doing more damage than the RNG job.
Dislike — Having to Level Jobs
Yeah, I get that this is pretty standard, and is a thing even up to Final Fantasy XIV, but it’s a real pain to start each job from level 1, especially since the plot just keeps ramping up the danger. That means more grinding to get them usable instead of continuing with the plot.
As we were leaving the dwarf village, a vision of a villager we’d met before appeared to us and asked for help. The evil Hein was no longer content with stealing villagers away, he was now burning down the town itself! And what’s worse, he was using a floating World Tree as his mobile base, which would kill the Living Forest and bring destruction on the world… again…
Well, I doubt it was all that urgent. I’m sure we would have plenty of time to grind some levels for the new jobs. And so we did. It was fine. They waited for us.
Several NPCs had advised that a Scholar job could help determine Hein’s weaknesses, that would change every time he would perform a Barrier Shift. Knowing that, we had the Scholar keep a close eye on Hein, and we held back on our elemental attacks. When Hein shifted and became weak to lightning, the Scholar let loose with Zeus’ Wrath alchemy, while the Black Mage did the same with Thundara. Hein was soon defeated, the Wind crystal had been saved, and we had a whole new set of jobs.
He also dropped the Wheel of Time, and wouldn’t you know it, Cid could use that little ol’ Wheel of Time to turn the Enterprise into an airship again. Water landings only, please.
With our new airship, we set off to see what was over the horizon.
We did some exploring and found a couple small bits of land, including an island with a prominent shipwreck. Exploring, we found a sage who was tending to Aria, a water priestess. We healed her with an Elixir, and she told us that the Water Crystal had been fractured, causing the waters of the world to rise, and turn everyone into stone, and just basically recapped the entire plot to Waterworld.
She had the shard with her. If we could just get her to the Temple of Water… well, of course we could.
Since changing jobs doesn’t restore magic slots, I couldn’t have Tom become a Black Mage again — he’d have been useless. So he took his Link cosplay into the temple. The whole thing went too fast. I’d meant to have Ally become a Scholar again, but we went into the fight with what we had and it wasn’t too bad.
As with the Ancient at the Tower of Fire, Aria was forced to sacrifice herself in the Temple of Water in order to restore the world and its people to its former state of dryness and not stone-ness. Basically, they’ll never have been aware of her sacrifice.
On the plus side, we have new jobs! Drew’s Monk became a Black Belt. I’ve tried a few different jobs for Tom, but it costs a lot to get new gear. The next promotion includes straight-up upgrades for WHM and BLM, but I think I want to try the Geomancer. Scholar would be awesome if we could just buy damage items.
But that’s where we left off, in Day 2 of our Final Fantasy 3 adventures!
