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FF1 Four Monks (MSX) Part III
Oct. 3rd, 2019 12:36 amI wanted to do some equipment planning before heading into the last couple dungeons. I wanted all characters to have at least one attacking item. I also wanted to have all three of the healing ones in play. Thankfully an unstated advantage of Monks is that they have no reason to consider their shield slot. So that's fully free. Two can hold the Heal Helmets, and the other two get the Black Shirt and Gauntlet.
Now there's only three Ribbons in the game...oh, damn it, I forgot to get the one in the Temple of Onrac! Had to go back and grab that, but it at least helped with grinding. Anyway, three Ribbons. So I can sacrifice a cap on someone to give them something else. But do I want that to be the Giant's Gauntlets banking on them having something after that debacle, or do I want it to be the White Shirt? I'll have to figure that one out.
Weapons-wise. Everyone will want their attacking weapon of course, that's one slot each. The two helmet wielders will want the Mage Staff and Thor Hammer. One of the others gets the staff, and I guess I can wing it from there.
T REX, aka Tyrannosaurus, actually showed up as I was heading to pick up the CHIME, still in fact called a Chime in Japanese. This was for the most part a simple melee. My Monks could deal good damage, and he couldn't deal enough to kill before he got killed. It was as simple as that.
...then I found out I forgot to use the Rosetta Stone. Ack. Hate the overworld on this version, it's so slow, so in doing as much to avoid going on it as possible, I avoided Melmond. Well, more grinding from the back and forth I guess.
Once that was out of the way. My first trip into the tower came to an abrupt end on the second floor. I ran into a random Blue Dragon! It promptly wiped out half the party with its lightning (いなずま). I was doing little physical damage, and was forced to get out of there while I still could.
Oh yes, it uses the volcano/Earth Cave song instead. They completely scrubbed the theme it uses from the game! Again, it's still in the data. You can listen to it here, it's just not ever used for some reason. Aside, give some of these tracks a listen if you can. The battle theme in particular sounds like a prototype of what they'd do with later remixes.
It's felt like it's ages since I've been in this room. Here's the Thor Hammer, still in fact called that in Japanese. Now 3/4 of my warriors had an itemcast weapon. I gave this one to Ryoma, because Tetsuya was still using the Staff of Healing when involved with things.
Something was amiss with the Blue Dragon, however. When I was testing fighting it before, my hits were pretty weak, so I tried magic. It's weak to Fire, so I figured that could do a ton of damage. Instead, it was doing less than expected, only around 71 at most. And instead the electric ones were doing tons of damage.
Heading into the Floating Castle (also a banger) I picked up the Raze Sabre (レイズサーベル) along the way, quite naturally. You might know it better as the BANE sword. Of course I'm going to use it to kill Tiamat, there's just no other way to do so at this point. His fault for having a weakness to it...
The other big pickup was the third Ribbon, hitting level 21 on everyone along the way. On NES this would be the big breakthrough point for them. But for this team, it's just an extra set of hits. The Black Robe was the last thing I wanted in here. Now everyone had a itemcasting piece of equipment.
Here's the other graphics that were changed for the US release of FF1. I also mention it because I actually had to pause here for a moment. I was like "what are those blue things?" Then I remembered those are Mancats and I probably wanted to run from this even though I could've fired all the spellcasting items off. At this point everyone had one.
Anyway--
Yuuuuuuup, here it is, in its fabulous pink palette in this version of the game. Didn't leave me alone in my variant playthroughs for very long. Fine, let's just get this over with. At least I actually got a preemptive attack on it, miraculously.
Uh, hold up, what? I forgot where I put my items and accidentally ended up using the Black Robe on it instead of having Tetsuya try and use the Giant's Gauntlets to buff again. That did way more damage than it should have. Warmech, or Death Machine as it's known as, is supposed to be immune to all elements. Yet here I am hitting it for more than ICE2 usually does hitting a resistance...unless I'm hitting a weakness? Consider the what happened a bit earlier with Blue Dragon too. Is this for real...?
Yes, yes it is. This version is completely screwed up. The others got some crits in first round, so they did some damage, but I had a way to fight this thing.
It got in one attack, a physical, before being killed by the items on turn 3.
Absolutely ridiculous. I've never seen this talked about in the MSX version before. Resistances seem to count as weaknesses, at least when it comes to damage. I'm not sure if it does when it comes to status, but if it does - and I'm going to test if it does, that has HUGE ramifications for this version.
Well, the instant death spell didn't want to cooperate, so I really had little choice but to take advantage of it. From what happened with Marilith and trying to land the Confu too, weaknesses may also be bugged in some way - come to think of it, my damage was pretty low in the Temple of Onrac against Sahagin groups too. I'll have to do a bit of testing on that to be sure.
This fight started going south really fast. I didn't get a chance to use the Raze Sabre because Tiamat just flattened the wielder of it. Then Ryoma went down to another ability burst, and Koji was killed by a physical.
Daisuke did pull through in the end, however.
All four crystals lit. It also occurs to me that I never actually showed a picture of an unlit one before - this version gives them different palettes. So I edited one back into the first update.
Anyway, a brief diversion. To sum it up, what seems to be happening on this version is that weaknesses are not applied to enemies, and resistances instead count as weaknesses. For fixing some of the bugs from the original, this sure is a massive coding failure on their part.
What about actually making use of this besides the desperation/styling on the idiot who dared show his face in front of me yet again? Well. As I stated in the preamble, the partial purpose of this variant is to see whether this party is truly as bad as the FFClassic guy claims it is even in their worst showing. Bug or not, it is an aspect of this version of the game that affects/improves mages too. It can't really be ignored, especially if you're going all out. So I'll use it if I have to, but will stay away from the most obvious abuses of it.
Anyway I'm going to grinding hell! It is a very real place. Since my plan is to try to win without relying on this resistance bug overly much, I need to do so. Monks rely almost entirely on critical hits in this version of the game. Since I didn't strength grind, my best and only way of making it is adding more hits, which means adding more levels. This means level 32, which means 399250 experience.
...
You know what? Let's just go. If I die too many times, well, still probably less bad than grinding hell. Final music change, it uses the song originally used in the Sea Shrine.
First trip in met up with my other nemesis besides Warmech! At least with Ribbons, they're relatively tame. Of course, only three can have them. Not too difficult to recover from. Other than that, this was about the most threatening thing I saw on the way.
Death Beholder, as it's known as, was physically vulnerable enough to be damaged without criticals, although I still saw a few X-Hits/X-Damage shots. Still keeps its status as the least threatening of the trio.
I ran into three sets of Earth Elementals on the way to Lich. Mostly an annoyance. Their damage did add up, however. In fact, I took lots of scratch damage along the way. I may have to get that White Robe after all, just to have enough healing to get through. Especially with the likes of Lich and his Flare.
But speaking of, I wanted to test one thing before inevitably failing. And yup, the resistance=weakness thing even extends to status spells. Lich is supposed to be immune to poison effects. Combined with its reasonable Magic Defense of 140 (how I was able to bank on QAKE in some previous challenges), he never stood a chance.
I kept moving on for the hell of it. Turns out I may have just missed the crit box on Kraken with the Giant's Gauntlets before, or at least if not that, it takes a lot more casts than the single one I tried. I'm inclined to think that even if it does do something, that it isn't going to be much help, whereas the White Robe will be. With that I can heal up with the item casting equipment on anything that's strictly physical.
Got destroyed against her, too. Definitely will need to use that against her and Kraken, so time to go get it. I somehow ended up not taking any pictures along the way. The fastest way out from there was across the dreaded bridge, but the robot stayed away this time.
My first trip into the temple met an end on the way to the Earth floor by way of these things. On the second trip, I got ambushed by SLIMEs/Black Puddings (ブラックプリン) two steps in who took out a huge chunk of my HP. Felt it was better and quicker to reset. Then it happened AGAIN, same two steps, same ambush. Fourth is when I finally started making progress.
Any encounter with only physical enemies, or that I could get down to only physical enemies, were excellent for restoring HP. It sure took time, however. Thank goodness for speedup.
Lich hit with his big nuke, but I brought him down without incident.
I healed up on a Fire Gigas afterwards. Not AGAMA, the spread damage fire is too obstructive for a team that doesn't have full protection. So after getting rid of the lizard, I could just sit back and heal and laugh as it couldn't hit me.
This was a bit of a tight thing. No issues here otherwise once I got up the evasion stacks, however.
Used potions to rebuild Ryoma's HP to a safer value before healing up the reset of the way against Water Elementals. The rest of the opposition on the floor were groups with Sea Trolls, Snakes, and Scorpions, that I just ran from. Kraken was going to be the big gut check.
And of course he did this. Why would he not? I may have to grind not necessarily for the added hits and damage potential, but just to survive this guy.
I did beat him, but that could spell trouble for the rest of the temple. I rearranged my inventory and kept going. I ran into a bit of trouble here when I rearranged it wrong and the White Robe and Staff of Healing ended up on the same character, heh. Did fix that and was able to resume my healing, eventually. My potion stocks were right out by the end of the floor...
But never mind that, now I could lay claim to the Masamune! Indeed, like any other weapon (or lack thereof) a Monk wields in this version of the game, it gets double the hits. In fact, this could expose a bug in this version where four digit damage isn't properly shown, although it still did the full amount of damage.
And here I am running into this 3/64 encounter again. Got out of it no problem.
I still needed critical hits to do any amount of real damage to high defense things. My damage varied greatly against Tiamat, which ended up being a bit of a tight thing because of that. She at least didn't use any of her AoE moves. Towards the end, Tetsuya ripped out first a 276, then that last one sealed the deal! That's what I like to see, and what I need to see against Chaos!
This version of the game retains two things about this floor from the Famicom version. First, there's still random encounters here! I don't know where they draw from, but I saw Purple Worms among them, so I assume it's similar if not identical to the Air floor. Second, the layout of the room is a pentagram, which meant a bit more running around.
I was able to get some worms to fight, which I used to heal back up to full despite a bit of nonsense with critical hits.
Can I do this a man down? Here's Tetsuya's stats. If he'd hit level 26, he would have 10 hits with the Masamune, so i guess I don't necessarily have to go to 32.
Well, here I go.
The initial going was good. Koji and Ryoma did 63 and 80 respectively, Chaos physically attacked Koji for 140.
Tetsuya landed some good solid hits over the next two turns. Slowly getting there.
Chaos landed one of his own on Koji, however. Could I still do this? I definitely theoretically have the damage at this level. My hits were generally good enough. I wasn't damage counting, or tracking it via a code, so I didn't know how close I was.
But alas...there's CUR4/Curega (ケアルガ). And yes, the level 4 spell uses the -ga suffix, even though the Black Magic ones use -ga as well. CUR3 is Cureda. That really was it, no way to deal enough damage in time before getting wiped from here, especially with yet another one of my warriors down on the floor.
...
Whatever. CUR4 this, bitch.
Next | Index
Now there's only three Ribbons in the game...oh, damn it, I forgot to get the one in the Temple of Onrac! Had to go back and grab that, but it at least helped with grinding. Anyway, three Ribbons. So I can sacrifice a cap on someone to give them something else. But do I want that to be the Giant's Gauntlets banking on them having something after that debacle, or do I want it to be the White Shirt? I'll have to figure that one out.
Weapons-wise. Everyone will want their attacking weapon of course, that's one slot each. The two helmet wielders will want the Mage Staff and Thor Hammer. One of the others gets the staff, and I guess I can wing it from there.
T REX, aka Tyrannosaurus, actually showed up as I was heading to pick up the CHIME, still in fact called a Chime in Japanese. This was for the most part a simple melee. My Monks could deal good damage, and he couldn't deal enough to kill before he got killed. It was as simple as that.
...then I found out I forgot to use the Rosetta Stone. Ack. Hate the overworld on this version, it's so slow, so in doing as much to avoid going on it as possible, I avoided Melmond. Well, more grinding from the back and forth I guess.
Once that was out of the way. My first trip into the tower came to an abrupt end on the second floor. I ran into a random Blue Dragon! It promptly wiped out half the party with its lightning (いなずま). I was doing little physical damage, and was forced to get out of there while I still could.
Oh yes, it uses the volcano/Earth Cave song instead. They completely scrubbed the theme it uses from the game! Again, it's still in the data. You can listen to it here, it's just not ever used for some reason. Aside, give some of these tracks a listen if you can. The battle theme in particular sounds like a prototype of what they'd do with later remixes.
It's felt like it's ages since I've been in this room. Here's the Thor Hammer, still in fact called that in Japanese. Now 3/4 of my warriors had an itemcast weapon. I gave this one to Ryoma, because Tetsuya was still using the Staff of Healing when involved with things.
Something was amiss with the Blue Dragon, however. When I was testing fighting it before, my hits were pretty weak, so I tried magic. It's weak to Fire, so I figured that could do a ton of damage. Instead, it was doing less than expected, only around 71 at most. And instead the electric ones were doing tons of damage.
Heading into the Floating Castle (also a banger) I picked up the Raze Sabre (レイズサーベル) along the way, quite naturally. You might know it better as the BANE sword. Of course I'm going to use it to kill Tiamat, there's just no other way to do so at this point. His fault for having a weakness to it...
The other big pickup was the third Ribbon, hitting level 21 on everyone along the way. On NES this would be the big breakthrough point for them. But for this team, it's just an extra set of hits. The Black Robe was the last thing I wanted in here. Now everyone had a itemcasting piece of equipment.
Here's the other graphics that were changed for the US release of FF1. I also mention it because I actually had to pause here for a moment. I was like "what are those blue things?" Then I remembered those are Mancats and I probably wanted to run from this even though I could've fired all the spellcasting items off. At this point everyone had one.
Anyway--
Yuuuuuuup, here it is, in its fabulous pink palette in this version of the game. Didn't leave me alone in my variant playthroughs for very long. Fine, let's just get this over with. At least I actually got a preemptive attack on it, miraculously.
Uh, hold up, what? I forgot where I put my items and accidentally ended up using the Black Robe on it instead of having Tetsuya try and use the Giant's Gauntlets to buff again. That did way more damage than it should have. Warmech, or Death Machine as it's known as, is supposed to be immune to all elements. Yet here I am hitting it for more than ICE2 usually does hitting a resistance...unless I'm hitting a weakness? Consider the what happened a bit earlier with Blue Dragon too. Is this for real...?
Yes, yes it is. This version is completely screwed up. The others got some crits in first round, so they did some damage, but I had a way to fight this thing.
It got in one attack, a physical, before being killed by the items on turn 3.
Absolutely ridiculous. I've never seen this talked about in the MSX version before. Resistances seem to count as weaknesses, at least when it comes to damage. I'm not sure if it does when it comes to status, but if it does - and I'm going to test if it does, that has HUGE ramifications for this version.
Well, the instant death spell didn't want to cooperate, so I really had little choice but to take advantage of it. From what happened with Marilith and trying to land the Confu too, weaknesses may also be bugged in some way - come to think of it, my damage was pretty low in the Temple of Onrac against Sahagin groups too. I'll have to do a bit of testing on that to be sure.
This fight started going south really fast. I didn't get a chance to use the Raze Sabre because Tiamat just flattened the wielder of it. Then Ryoma went down to another ability burst, and Koji was killed by a physical.
Daisuke did pull through in the end, however.
All four crystals lit. It also occurs to me that I never actually showed a picture of an unlit one before - this version gives them different palettes. So I edited one back into the first update.
Anyway, a brief diversion. To sum it up, what seems to be happening on this version is that weaknesses are not applied to enemies, and resistances instead count as weaknesses. For fixing some of the bugs from the original, this sure is a massive coding failure on their part.
What about actually making use of this besides the desperation/styling on the idiot who dared show his face in front of me yet again? Well. As I stated in the preamble, the partial purpose of this variant is to see whether this party is truly as bad as the FFClassic guy claims it is even in their worst showing. Bug or not, it is an aspect of this version of the game that affects/improves mages too. It can't really be ignored, especially if you're going all out. So I'll use it if I have to, but will stay away from the most obvious abuses of it.
Anyway I'm going to grinding hell! It is a very real place. Since my plan is to try to win without relying on this resistance bug overly much, I need to do so. Monks rely almost entirely on critical hits in this version of the game. Since I didn't strength grind, my best and only way of making it is adding more hits, which means adding more levels. This means level 32, which means 399250 experience.
...
You know what? Let's just go. If I die too many times, well, still probably less bad than grinding hell. Final music change, it uses the song originally used in the Sea Shrine.
First trip in met up with my other nemesis besides Warmech! At least with Ribbons, they're relatively tame. Of course, only three can have them. Not too difficult to recover from. Other than that, this was about the most threatening thing I saw on the way.
Death Beholder, as it's known as, was physically vulnerable enough to be damaged without criticals, although I still saw a few X-Hits/X-Damage shots. Still keeps its status as the least threatening of the trio.
I ran into three sets of Earth Elementals on the way to Lich. Mostly an annoyance. Their damage did add up, however. In fact, I took lots of scratch damage along the way. I may have to get that White Robe after all, just to have enough healing to get through. Especially with the likes of Lich and his Flare.
But speaking of, I wanted to test one thing before inevitably failing. And yup, the resistance=weakness thing even extends to status spells. Lich is supposed to be immune to poison effects. Combined with its reasonable Magic Defense of 140 (how I was able to bank on QAKE in some previous challenges), he never stood a chance.
I kept moving on for the hell of it. Turns out I may have just missed the crit box on Kraken with the Giant's Gauntlets before, or at least if not that, it takes a lot more casts than the single one I tried. I'm inclined to think that even if it does do something, that it isn't going to be much help, whereas the White Robe will be. With that I can heal up with the item casting equipment on anything that's strictly physical.
Got destroyed against her, too. Definitely will need to use that against her and Kraken, so time to go get it. I somehow ended up not taking any pictures along the way. The fastest way out from there was across the dreaded bridge, but the robot stayed away this time.
My first trip into the temple met an end on the way to the Earth floor by way of these things. On the second trip, I got ambushed by SLIMEs/Black Puddings (ブラックプリン) two steps in who took out a huge chunk of my HP. Felt it was better and quicker to reset. Then it happened AGAIN, same two steps, same ambush. Fourth is when I finally started making progress.
Any encounter with only physical enemies, or that I could get down to only physical enemies, were excellent for restoring HP. It sure took time, however. Thank goodness for speedup.
Lich hit with his big nuke, but I brought him down without incident.
I healed up on a Fire Gigas afterwards. Not AGAMA, the spread damage fire is too obstructive for a team that doesn't have full protection. So after getting rid of the lizard, I could just sit back and heal and laugh as it couldn't hit me.
This was a bit of a tight thing. No issues here otherwise once I got up the evasion stacks, however.
Used potions to rebuild Ryoma's HP to a safer value before healing up the reset of the way against Water Elementals. The rest of the opposition on the floor were groups with Sea Trolls, Snakes, and Scorpions, that I just ran from. Kraken was going to be the big gut check.
And of course he did this. Why would he not? I may have to grind not necessarily for the added hits and damage potential, but just to survive this guy.
I did beat him, but that could spell trouble for the rest of the temple. I rearranged my inventory and kept going. I ran into a bit of trouble here when I rearranged it wrong and the White Robe and Staff of Healing ended up on the same character, heh. Did fix that and was able to resume my healing, eventually. My potion stocks were right out by the end of the floor...
But never mind that, now I could lay claim to the Masamune! Indeed, like any other weapon (or lack thereof) a Monk wields in this version of the game, it gets double the hits. In fact, this could expose a bug in this version where four digit damage isn't properly shown, although it still did the full amount of damage.
And here I am running into this 3/64 encounter again. Got out of it no problem.
I still needed critical hits to do any amount of real damage to high defense things. My damage varied greatly against Tiamat, which ended up being a bit of a tight thing because of that. She at least didn't use any of her AoE moves. Towards the end, Tetsuya ripped out first a 276, then that last one sealed the deal! That's what I like to see, and what I need to see against Chaos!
This version of the game retains two things about this floor from the Famicom version. First, there's still random encounters here! I don't know where they draw from, but I saw Purple Worms among them, so I assume it's similar if not identical to the Air floor. Second, the layout of the room is a pentagram, which meant a bit more running around.
I was able to get some worms to fight, which I used to heal back up to full despite a bit of nonsense with critical hits.
Can I do this a man down? Here's Tetsuya's stats. If he'd hit level 26, he would have 10 hits with the Masamune, so i guess I don't necessarily have to go to 32.
Well, here I go.
The initial going was good. Koji and Ryoma did 63 and 80 respectively, Chaos physically attacked Koji for 140.
Tetsuya landed some good solid hits over the next two turns. Slowly getting there.
Chaos landed one of his own on Koji, however. Could I still do this? I definitely theoretically have the damage at this level. My hits were generally good enough. I wasn't damage counting, or tracking it via a code, so I didn't know how close I was.
But alas...there's CUR4/Curega (ケアルガ). And yes, the level 4 spell uses the -ga suffix, even though the Black Magic ones use -ga as well. CUR3 is Cureda. That really was it, no way to deal enough damage in time before getting wiped from here, especially with yet another one of my warriors down on the floor.
...
Whatever. CUR4 this, bitch.
Next | Index
