What brought the four Warriors of Light together? From where did they get the crystals of the four primal forces? Who were their families? Where’d they go to school? What foods did they like?
Hell if I know. All I know is that they’re pretty good at killing fiends and running away. Mostly the running away. But we managed to finish the game and save the world, somehow.
It’s been so many days since I blogged about my Final Fantasy 1 playthrough that I’ve lost track of where I was last time.
Fiend of Earth? I DIMLY remember fighting him — the Lich, right?
Next up was Marilith, the Fiend of Fire. She was holed up in a volcano, as maybe you’d expect. The only way to this volcano — a canoe. If I have a secret volcano lair, I’m definitely going to invest heavily in anti-canoe defenses.
Name: Marilith
Occupation: Part time Fiend, full time mom
Hobbies: Lava baths, hanging out with the basilisks at the Pumice Paradise down on Elm St.
Likes: Barbecue
Dislikes: People with personal floatation devices.
We’d gotten access to better spells by this time. We never did get a spell that would protect us from any of the elements the fiends would really be likely to use, but we did get Haste and Temper fairly early on. With Marilith, we were still focusing on physical attacks, as I was nervous about running out of spells if we focused on magic.
This wouldn’t be much of a concern, going forward.
The Lich and Marilith were on the southern continent. The other two fiends must be on the northern continent — but none of the cities in the North had ever thought that building docks for boats might be a useful idea. A crazy guy we met insisted that he’d been searching for a levistone that might do something special. With nothing better to do, we followed his directions to an ice cave which was super frustrating. It wasn’t hard to find the levistone. It was just impossible to get to it. Cracks in the ice would send us down again and again to the floor below, and we’d have to climb again and again until a little voice sitting behind me suggested dropping into a safe spot from the floor above… which worked.
With the levistone, we could go to the desert and raise the airship… and now the world was our oyster. As long as there was a nice grassy spot for an airfield, anyway.
We discovered a mysterious new castle that looked totally interested. Trials? They wanted us to do trials? Of courage and bravery? That sounds like something right up our alley.
The trials actually were pretty much solving mazes, and it turns out the thing Warriors of Light do best of everything, is solve mazes. We found a perfectly preserved Rat’s Tail. Who would want a rat’s tail? We’d been told that the Dragon King, Bahamut, would be looking for proof of bravery and courage that might not look like we’d expect. Turns out, a rat’s tail was just what he was looking for. He granted everyone new titles. Drew the Monk became Drew the Master. Tom and Ally doffed their hoods and became Black and White Wizards. I became a Red Wizard, but when I went to take off my hat, everyone insisted I keep wearing it. O-kay, then.
Name: The Kraken
Occupation: Litigating elections
Hobbies: Collecting mermaids
Likes: Her hair is green as seaweed, her skin is blue and pale, you’re gonna love her with all yer heart
Dislikes: But just gonna like the upper part, ‘cuz nobody likes the tail
We were out exploring a desert and found a caravan camped in a forest at the edge. There was only one person in the camp — a merchant. The merchant sold just one thing — jars of fairies. He has an exclusive clientele and caters to their peculiar tastes. But all we knew is, we just had to get ourselves some pixie jars.
Later on, our explorations brought us to a distant town, and the pixie up and jumped out of the jar. Running after her, we found her near a spring. She promised to get us some oxytale, whatever that was. Turns out, it’s an ore that produces all the air we could ever need, if we ever found ourselves in a place with no air, but was otherwise amenable to our existence.
We found a mermaid by the docks who promised us wealth and fame if we would just follow her into this here conveniently placed barrel, and of course we did. The barrel began sinking straight into the dark depths, and we could hear the mermaid ask us to save her sisters, as she herself began to turn into seafoam. Now I know where Dragon Quest XI got it from ><…
Our first fiend post promotion hit harder than we expected. We took him down, but there were some deaths. Time to come up with a new strategy.
We found a Rosetta stone that helped us translate between Greek, Egyptian and hieroglyphics. I guess it also taught us the speech of the Sky People of Lefneria, which is presumably Egyptian. I mean, come on, the Rosetta stone is something specific. I guess it used to be just a slab which had similar properties… A linguist was able to learn Lefnerian from the stone in a few seconds, and he taught us the language in a few seconds more.
This sounds unbelievable, but it turns out you can only say four things in Lefnerian: “Hello”, “Goodbye”, “My name is…” and “This chime can be used to open the mystic tower in the center of the desert to the west”. It’s a very focused language.
We took a side trip into a waterfall cave to get a warp cube (more to shut up the kid who insisted something had fallen there but nobody would believe him than any other reason). We somehow knew we’d need a warp cube at some point.
The chime we were given in Lefneria made a tower rise from the desert. The warp cube let us teleport from that tower to the old Sky Castle. There we found Adamantite and… Tiamat! Mother of dragons!
Name: Tiamat
Occupation: Romancing pretty boys who might be their first cousins
Likes: Tying knots
Dislikes: Sharing meals
We’d read that this sword that casts Scourge could be used to defeat Tiamat in one blow. Master Drew was faithfully using that sword every single round, hoping for the easy kill, but after awhile, Tiamat and the rest of us just stopped fighting so we could watch him try again. And again. And again to make that sword do anything.
Tom the Black Wizard had learned Flare by then — a nuke against which there is no resistance. Ally the White Wizard chain cast group heals while the rest of us just used nukes. Except Drew. MISS. MISS. MISS. MISS. Was he just trying to get my attention? Didn’t he know my name? Oh well. We eventually took down Tiamat, the last of the four fiends. Yay! The world was saved!
We’d heard legends of a Warmech that guarded the approach to Tiamat’s Lair. I spent a solid forty-five minutes walking back and forth trying to spawn it. I eventually wanted to take on Tiamat before I entirely ran out of supplies, so I went and killed her, then came back to the patrol.
It finally spawned! And killed me almost immediately! Back to the walking!
The next time it spawned, I’d formed a new plan, that I used for every boss in the rest of the game.
- Red Wizard: Cast Temper on the Master, Invisra on the party, then spot heals, melees, nukes, whatever seems appropriate
- White Wizard: Protectra on the party and NulAll on the Master, in between group heals. For Warmech, group heals were more necessary than on other bosses.
- Black Wizard: Haste the Master, Saber self (I think it improves spell accuracy), then chain Flare.
- Master: Hit. It. In. The. Face. At max buffs, Master hit 24 times per attack.
The world was not free. The sages of Crescent Lake informed us, that though we’d defeated the Four Fiends in the present, they had just taken refuge in the past, at the behest of the Chaos King, no other than the traitorous knight Garland! Sent back in time when we killed him, he rose again as a dark lord and sent the Four Fiends from the past to the present in an endless circle of time.
Our only escape would be to confront him in the past and kill him for good this time. We would be destroying ourselves as well, but what price to free a world? We, the Warriors of Light, would see it through. We returned to the Chaos Shrine, and spoke with the bats who were actually transformed Sky People (Conversation went like: Hello? Hello! Helloooooo???? My name is…? GOODBYE!!!!).
We inferred they wanted us to use our crystals to empower the orb and return to the past, two thousand years ago.
We first had to reach the top of the Shrine to find the correct stairs back down it again. Along the way, we faced younger, prettier, dare we say sexier versions of the four fiends. The Warmech strategy took them all down in a few rounds with no deaths. Now they would never be sent to the future.
Garland was still a little sore that we’d killed him, but he appreciated the time loop that would keep bringing him back to life.
He even had a new set of clothes to show off!
Name: Chaos (née Garland)
Occupation: Every day, the same old, same old
Likes: Knowing what fun tomorrow will bring
Dislikes: Actually seeing tomorrow
We weren’t trying to flee the fight, no matter what the screenshot says. In order to make it through all four levels of the Chaos Shrine with enough Hi-Potions and Ethers, and to finish the game sometime this year, I just started running from all fights except the important ones.
The Warmech strategy worked fine, though it took a very long time to kill Chaos. He didn’t have any extra forms as he died, and he wasn’t nearly as dangerous as everyone had said.
With Chaos dead, the time loop was broken, and we found ourselves arriving at the end credits with no memories of our adventures… and that was it. That was Final Fantasy 1.
Time to complete: 20 1/2 hours
Achievements: All except three — we still needed to add all beasts to the Bestiary and open every treasure chest, and the last achievement for getting all the others. I don’t think it would be worth getting those.
If I had to do it over again: I’d have brought a Fighter. A lot of the gear that drops can only be wielded by a fighter. The Black Mage can replace everything the Red Mage does, and does a lot more damage. Toward the end, it was nice having someone help the White Mage buff, and in the end I was able to easily finish the game with this crew… but it hurt not having someone who could wear Diamond Armor and wield Excalibur.
Ranking among other Final Fantasy games: Well, I liked it better than Final Fantasy X or XIII, that’s for sure. I love the classic gameplay. I would have appreciated some actual plot or character development — given how much of that we get in future FF games, it’s weird there weren’t more signs of it here.
FF Tactics > FF6 > FF4 > FF7 > FF8 > FF9 > FF1 > FF12 > FF15 > FF13 > FF10
That sounds about right.
Next: Final Fantasy III. I’m skipping FF2, as I want to see the job system, and FF3 is where that was introduced.
