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[ABANDONED] [SSLP] Let's Play Final Fantasy I (GBA); A screenshot LP of the game that started a legacy. Well, the port of that game, at least.
Topic Started: Nov 10 2013, 10:28 PM (2,104 Views)
Amnesia
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...And we have returned to the bonus dungeons of Final Fantasy I! This time, we are going to tackle the Lifespring Grotto, where we can face some bosses from Final Fantasy V, and oh boy, is it a fucking long-ass dungeon. It is 20 floors long. 20. I had to go through it twice, man. Fortunately, once you know your way around you can do it pretty quickly, and there are some pretty interesting floors in this dungeon, so without further ado, let's begin.


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The Lifespring Grotto can be found just near the land we had to explode during the earlier part of the game. Do you remember that? No? Okay. Well, it was a small whirlpool that you could see and enter it, but if you didn't defeat Kraken yet, you would not be able to enter it. The place, as expected, is water themed, and is where some mermaids live.

Remember that the order of the floors that I went through are random, so you might do them in a different order if you play the game.


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The first floor was nothing special. Just your vanilla dungeon floor. Very similar to the Sunken Shrine's floors. Fortunately, most of these floors are quite small, and you can find the exit very quickly, so it's nice if you can take the time to look for some chests. In some floors, the random encounter rate is tolerable. Overall, I didn't get too pissed off during the first run of the dungeon because I walked instead of running. Sometimes I think that random encouter rate goes up if you sprint, but that is just an illusion. Since you are walking by the tiles faster, it will appear that the battles are appearing faster, when in truth it is just you who are walking fast. Meh, I decided to walk instead of running because dashing through the dungeons isn't very interesting. You can't enjoy the sights.

Let me tell you a little secret, just between you and me. It seems that the forum limit of 6 images has been increased to 10 images. That will make my job a lot easier, since I won't have to cut parts that I think are interesting. However, you can only post 10 linked images, not ones that were uploaded through the forum. The limit of image attachments on the forum is 5 images.


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Oh yeah, did I also mention that I was so filthy rich in the previous chapter, that I went on a buying spree and bought 99 of each item that sold in shops? Yep. Not all of the items, mind you, only the more important ones. My gil was maxed the fuck out, so I had to do something. I also bought the rest of the spells for my wizards. WE ARE STRONG BISH
The problem was that during the dungeon there were many instances of me not able to get some treasure chests because they wanted to give me items that I already had 99 of. Seriously, why are you giving an item that can be bought on shops, bonus dungeon? Shouldn't you be giving me items that I WOULDN'T be able to find normally and are rare as fuck? Fuck you, Square-Enix. Fuck you. Also, why give me so little gil for the effort of exploring the dungeons? Granted, I already get a lot of gil from defeating enemies, but I'm only facing them and getting a lot of gil because I'm looking for the chests in the first place. Goddamn it.


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Oh yes, the second floor of this dungeon is pretty interesting. So, weirdly enough, we have somehow managed to leave the underwater dungeon and enter some kind of floating palace. Oh, but that's not the interesting part, do you see those flashing floors? At first, I thought that you would have to run really fast and get to where you wanted before the tiles would disappear, but it's different. The tiles show where you are allowed to walk on. If you step outside of those tiles, you will be teleported to the beginning of the floor. It doesn't matter if you step on them if they are invisible, so long as you step on where they should be.

This was a very interesting floor. I enjoyed it so much that I ended up exploring the whole place. Seriously, why can't more dungeons be interesting like this? They didn't even try to design good dungeons for the majority of these bonus dungeons, they just added them in hopes that it would be enough of a reason for fans to buy the game again on GBA. Hell, this version is basically the Wonderswan version of the game, couldn't they, oh you know, actually had taken the time and effort to create the dungeons? They fucking had the game already finished, goddamn it. -10/10 for effort.

Some interesting items that I got on this floor was the Golden Apple, which increases a party member's max HP by 10 permanently, and the Mind Plus, which I think I have already explained before, but it increases a party member's Intelligence by 1. It might seem like nothing, but you get more of these, and it will add up. I used it on my Black Wizard because he is the one with the least HP on the party.

Third floor wasn't interesting. It was just a normal dungeon floor. Didn't have any interesting treasures. Be aware that the number of treasure chests are random, so each time you go through the dungeon there might be more or less treasure chests on floors. The items get restocked, so in theory you could do some serious item grinding in these dungeons, especially considering that if you want to just leave them, you can just die and you'll return to the dungeon's entrance, instead of getting a game over. However, fortunately, or unfortunately, I am not that insane.


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Ah, but the fourth floor was indeed interesting! This floor is just like the place where you meet Bahamut, and there he/she(?) is! Fucking Bahamut again! But wait, it seems that it isn't Bahamut at all! IT IS FUCKING DARK BAHAMUT

Man, they could've made a different sprite for it. Hell, it could have been even a recolored version of Bahamut, but even them it would've looked better. Shame on you, Squeenix.

I wonder if one day we will face someone like Sephiroth as a bonus boss in a future Final Fantasy game. They did that on Kingdom Hearts, but it would be interesting to face him as a bonus boss in another game. I don't think that they would use the last boss of one of their games and a bonus boss in another one, but it would be really fucking cool. Why not characters from previous games, too? That would be nice as well. [strike]But I digress[/strike]THE GREAT CLEMENT <3.

Oh yeah, I lost track of my thought there. Well, all you gotta do in this part is defeat the type of dragons in the quantity that Dark Bahamut wants. They appear as NPCs walking around, so you need to talk to them to enter battle and hope that it is one of the dragons that you need to face. There is nothing wrong with killing another type of dragon, but there are so many of them walking around there that you will get a little frustrated. The strongest dragon there is the Holy Dragon, by far. It can cast Holy and takes 2 turns of attacking to kill.

After defeating the dragons that Dark Bahamut wanted us to, he unlocks the exit of the room, and go to the next floor.

The fifth floor, huh? The fifth floor... has nothing to see. Move along kids.

Just kidding bro, there is something in this floor indeed. Here we can see many mermaids walking around and we can talk to them. Fortunately, there are no random encounters in this floor, so you can explore all you want. Talking to some of the mermaids reveals that this is the village of Seahold. Hmm. Quite a small village there, but I guess I'm not expert in underwater mermaids villages, so you shouldn't take me seriously on that regard. We also learn that a strange man with a halberd is walking around searching for a sword of "matchless power". One of the mermaids say that since the village is connected to the sea, all sorts of crap end up there, and maybe the sword is here, too. Walking around the floor and talking to the mermaids just reveals more information about the location of the person carrying a halberd. They seem to also know about the Warriors of Light and about Kraken's defeat. One mermaid got surprised that we were a lot younger than she expected. Bitch, you know nothing. I saved the world when I was five. These guys are chumps.


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One curious detail about this floor is that you can find a group of broken robots laying around on an area of the floor. It is interesting because this sprite of the robots is never used during the normal game, at least from what I remember, and if you try to interact with them, the game will just remark that they are broken.

I'm gonna give you 10 seconds to guess who the man carrying a halberd is.

10...

9...

8...

7...

Ah, fuck it, just see it for yourself:





Welp, it is Gilgamesh. Boy, was he easy. I added the 20th Anniversary "Clash on the Big Bridge" version of the song for this battle in the video, because in this game they only play the normal boss themes for these bonus bosses, instead of remixes of the songs from the games the bosses are from. Lame.

But yeah, Gilgamesh was very easy. One of the attacks that he has is "Excalipur", which is a knockoff of Excalibur that only deals 1 damage. He didn't live enough to use the real Excalibur on me, but I don't know if he has it. If I recall, we do get Excalibur later on in the game. I never finished FFV, so I didn't have a fangasm when I saw Gilgamesh, but this is not the first game that I encountered him. The first time being in Final Fantasy VIII, and it was badass as fuck. One of the best moments in that game, seriously. You might not even see that moment when you play it, because it is something optional.

But this is still the 5th floor of the dungeon and there are still 15 to go, my friend. Stay tuned.


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The sixth floor was another interesting floor as well. Damn, it seems that they decided to put the most interesting floors in this dungeon. In this one, you are using the canoe while searching for the exit. It seems the city has been destroyed and abandoned a long time ago. You can find some chests here, and the good news is that there are no random battles. The main issue with this floor is that there is no clear exit. You can't enter the houses, and there is no way to leave the area, but then you find out that the exit to the next floor is actually one of the houses, and you have to enter it. How you were supposed to know that, given that you cannot enter the other houses is beyond me. But, I did manage to exit it, so...

The seventh and eighth floors were vanilla dungeon floors with some treasure chests. These floors are pretty small, so there is not much to do in them. I think I got a little lost on the 8th floor, but I use something like a pattern-based exploration system, or the grid exploration system, which is a fancy way of saying: "I go here first and then I check that out later."

The ninth floor was similar to the one where we went to get the crown for the King-who-was-totally-not-Astos-in-disguise and where we faced the dreaded Piscodemons. There are stone pillars all over the place, which have the most noble function of blocking your path and making you search for a way around them. The random encounters started to annoy me again here. But, once again, the floors are pretty small, so my annoyance was happily short-lived. I also got a Silver Apple here, which is like a Golden Apple, but instead of increasing your maximum HP by 10, it increases it by 5. Awesome, I know, right? I gave it to Void, the Black Wizard, because of his low HP.





The tenth floor was very small, but there was another boss fight in it, and I was not expecting that. Man, this dungeon is full of surprises. Good ones, mostly. The boss that we face here is Atomos, which I never heard of before. Don't get mad at me if FFV is your favorite Final Fantasy, because I do intend on playing it too. Right after I start playing and finish FFIV. Atomos is manageable. It's strongest attack is Wormhole, which can insta-kill a party member if they do not have protection against death. Fortunately, I had Protect Rings equipped on all of my party members, and so it nulled the attack's effect. Another boss bites the dust.

I forgot to mention that not only you can return to the surface by dieing, using an item to exit the dungeon or a spell, you can also use teleports that are conveniently placed in an area where you fight a boss. The only time you are required to use them is when you get to the last floors, because you can't return to face another boss if you want to. Because padding, that's why!

The eleventh floor was different, visually. It is another generic dungeon floor, though. One thing that I found troublesome in floors that use the same design is that it can be hard to see doors because they kinda blend in with their surroundings. Another evil design technique perpetuated by RPG game designers who want their game to appear longer than it is. EVVIL (with two Vs because it's more evil). Another interesting item that I got here was a Protect Drink. It acts just like the Protect spell, and it is useful in certain situations.

The twelfth was similar to the eleventh, but this time our enemy is pillars who block our way! We must find ways around a single pillar that foils progress in our adventure! PILLARS
Another good item that I found here was Light Curtain, which is also another item that can only be found in these bonus dungeons. What it does is that it reduces the damage from all types of spells. It is the same thing as the NullAll spell that I have for my White Wizard, but it is still a good item to have because the NullAll spell only targets a single party member. So, one party member could be buffed with the NullAll spell, and the others could use Light Curtain. Very useful when the boss you are facing uses very damaging spells.

Now the 13th floor (!!!!) is-


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WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

Dancers...? Holy shit, what do I do!? Should I run? Should I face them? Oh god, the horror!

Jokes aside, the 13th floor is very interesting. There is absolutely nothing to do except get to the exit, getting some chests if there are any, and talking to the dancers. It really is a floor so you can rest a little. I appreciate the kindness, and the humor was not lost on me. BUT STILL, you gotta wonder how the fuck that makes any sense. Weren't we underwater, so... just who are these people? Where are we!?

I guess some people just can't master the tango, if you know what I mean. (I don't know what I mean) The mango is all in the hips. ONE, TWO, ONE, TW-

JUST DANCE GONNA BE OKAY DANDURUM JUST DANCE DANCE DANCE DANCE J--J-J-JUST DANCE

Square-Enix should make a Final Fantasy game about dancing. [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatrhythm_Final_Fantasy"]Theatrhythm Final Fantasy[/URL] does not count. Let's dance to the classics such as [url="http://youtu.be/3jho-peCAKs"]The Man with the Machine Gun[/URL]! It would be awesome. I'm half serious.

But really now, the 13th floor is divided into 3 parts (!!!!! [strike]HALF-LIFE 3 CONFIRMED[/strike]). In the second part, you have to enter a line of dancers to get to the warp. You can talk to them, and it is interesting to do so, because it will fuck up their line formation. The third part is very straightforward, as you only need to get to the exit to the next floor. Sometimes the dancers can get in the way, but you can push them if you keep moving towards them. I find that the AI for pushing NPCs is very well made. They will get out of the way no problem. They don't only move towards the direction you are pushing them, but they take into account where you want to go. It's very neat.


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Speaking of pushing people, how about another floor where you can do is talk and push people? Welcome to the 14th floor, folks. A library of some sort where you can find tons of educated gentlemen studying about many topics. It is here that they actually make use of pushing the NPCs as a floor mechanic and are flagrant about it, since many NPCs say something along the lines of: "I won't move! You want to get through? NO". Honestly, I am a little surprised. I guess they were really out of ideas there. But still, it is a pretty interesting floor and, like the previous one, it serves to break up the pace a little. You know, variety, and stuff. There are some treasure chests here, so keep on the lookout. The most bizarre thing about this floor, in my opinion, is that there is a NPC who wonders if a certain branch of psychology can be addapted and applied to monsters. He says: "After all, monsters are people too." Excuse me, sir? Another NPC is very certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. Okay...

Anyway, enough of those crazy people. See, everyone? Studying will make you go mad. As will making let's plays, as well. Seriously go on YouTube and check some let's plays. People are nuts. Anyway, I lost track again on where I was going. Oh yeah, the 15th floor. We're hitting home stretch, yay! The 15th floor is similar to the eleventh and twelfth, visually. There are some pillars blocking the way, like the twelfth floor, but it is much more straightforward. There some treasure chests here that I opened. One of those treasures, in particular, was the sword Asura, and it will remind you of Asura's Wrath. Beyond that, the sword is weaker than the ones we currently have equipped, and it is throw away into our Resident Evil box for later use (or more likely, never to be used).

The 16th floor is another basic underwater floor, like the had gone before and the Sunken Shrine. Nothing special here, but I might as well take the time to mention a fucking evil monster that lies in this dungeon that I didn't mention. The Killer Sharks. Remember the normal sharks that you sometimes face while sailing the ship? No? Well, it is just like those sharks, but it's color is a dark blue and it is 100x stronger. I even made my Black Wizard cast spells against them, and that is something I rarely do against normal enemies.


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Now, the 17th floor is where Square-Enix takes common sense and curb stomps it repeatedly. The floor takes place in THE FUCKING SKY. AGAIN. How? What is even? Once, okay, but twice? Not even an explanation? Fuck, I used stairs to get here. They weren't even going up, goddamn it. But yeah, here we are in the sky. Again. The random encounter rate here did annoy me a lot, and the floor is average-sized, but I was taking it slowly and enjoying the ride, baby. So it was not a problem. An interesting enemy that we face here is called the "Death Manticore", and I'm pretty sure that is the name of some sort of heavy metal band, or new metal subgenre. It sure as hell sounds like it.

The 18th floor makes SOME sense in context, as it is an ice cave, but that is stretching the meaning of the word "sense" to the point where it becomes Slender Man in bizarre body proportions. It contains those spike ice tiles, like another dungeon that we went, the Ice Cavern, that damages us everytime we step on them. We are filled to the brink with potions and the like, so this is not a problem. Also, they deal like what? 1 or 10 in damage? Pfft! Trivial.

Did I mention that in all of these bonus dungeons there are recurring enemies? The one that appears the most is the Black Goblin, which is just a re-color of the first enemies we face in the game, the Goblins. They are just as weak.

And now, we are getting close... The 19th floor. Hell, this place is practically an inverted skyscraper, already. This floor is, again, your regular water dungeon floor. It is very small, but you can still get a little lost in it, due to the fact that there is a section where you think the path is going to lead you to a different place, but it just returns you to where you began. It isn't difficult or confusing, I just have a poor sense of direction in video games.

...FUCKING FINALLY THE MOMENT WE HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR ON THE FUCKING 20TH FLOOR...

...OMEGA & SHINRYU






Yeah, these fuckers are major pain in the asses. I tackled Omega first, and I died around 3 or 4 times. His defense is so fucking high, that it is practically impossible to damage him without using buffs. I will admit, I went to the wiki to learn how to defeat it, but to be fair, my tactic didn't change all that much. The only thing that I did differently, was that I used Healaga practically every turn, and I used an item called Giant's Gloves, which casts Saber when used. Saber is like Temper, but instead of just increasing your attack, it also increases your accuracy. The amount that is increases them is higher, than Temper, as well. I bought Saber for my Black Wizard some time ago, but I thought that it would work just like Temper, but then I found out that Saber can only be used on the caster, which is why the Giant's Gloves are so useful. And you don't even use MP! But yeah, even while having a good strategy, Omega took a long time to beat. I thought it took 30 minutes to defeat him, but it was only about 15.

Now, Shinryu was a lot easier. Since I had the Light Curtain and the NullAll spell, most of Shinryu high damaging spells were nerfed, and I healed my party each time. Shinryu doesn't have a high defense stat like Omega does, so he goes down WAY faster.

And that's all for this chapter, folks! This one took a while. I played the game for about 2 hours, but the actual post took about 4 hours to make. Man, even with the increased image limit, I still feel that I could have made it better by using more images.

HOORAY FOR AUTISM!
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Amnesia
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Yeah, bitches! The time has come for us to defeat the last fiend and restore the crystal of Wind! The end of the game is finally nigh! Fasten your seatbelts, folks.


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So in the last chapter, we (that means me) took on the Lifespring Grotto bonus dungeon and cleared it successfully. Now, it is time for us to return to the Mirage Tower, and through it, we will be able to enter Tiamat's lair.


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Mirage Tower is a short dungeon filled with treasures that I've already taken before this update took place. Sorry. In it, we can face one of our old foes, the Vampire, which was a pussy when we first faced it and still is a pussy now. It is probably not the same vampire we faced, but the sprite and the name of the enemy are the same, but there are many of them so I'm not sure what to make of this. Perhaps the Mirage Tower is simply a nest for vampires?


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Inside the tower, we can find a couple of those robots that we saw in an earlier update. It seems that they believe that we are their masters. I don't know if that is due to us carrying the Warp Cube item, or if it is just due to them malfunctioning. Perhaps the latter.


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In the second floor, we can find another robot. It says that another robot took the Warp Cube to the west to see their master. The robot that it is referring to is the one that we met inside a cave and we got the Warp Cube from it. Also, who or what exactly is their master? I was under the impression that these robots were created by the Sky People, the ancestrals of the Lufenians, were they not? But it seems that they only have a single master, instead of their master being the whole Sky People. Who could they be referring to?


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In the third floor we finally find the warp point. A robot on our side says to use the Warp Cube to reach the flying fortress. If we didn't already have the Warp Cube, we would have to go back and search for it, but fortunately that has already been taken care of.


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Welcome to the Flying Fortress, folks! Do you remember this place? No? Well, there were some floors exactly like it in the Lifespring Grotto dungeon. Unfortunately, there is no epic cutscene showing us teleporting over there or the like. Lame. But yeah, this place was built by the Sky People a long time ago, and is the resting place of the Wind Crystal. Tiamat attack this place hundreds of years ago and has been here ever since. It is time someone evicted the fucker.

I might as well get this out of the way first: The random encounter rate here is pretty damn high. You can barely walk 5-7 tiles and there will be another battle.


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The first two floors don't have anything special, besides treasures chests. I took my time to explore and open all of them to get some interesting items. Most of the equipment that I got here was weaker than the ones I currently had, or were ones that I already had. I got so much money from the random battles and chests that my gil maxed again.


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It is here on the second floor that you can find the rare adamantite. With it, we can now obtain another weapon which we'll see later. Let's move on to the third floor!





Here on the third floor, we can find some strange glowing orb inside a room and a robot near it. The robot will explain that this is an observation window, and that you can see the whole world from there. In it, we see the 4 elements converging on a single point in the world: The Chaos Shrine, where we first faced Garland and rescued the princess in the beginning of the game. I WONDER WHAT THIS COULD POSSIBLY MEAN

On this floor, we can also find some weird tablets with glowing inscriptions on them. Inspecting them will display a text window saying: "...analyzing TIAmat... no known WEAKNESS...". Ooh, how foreboding.

The fourth floor is one of those looping floors again, but it's pretty simple. So it doesn't deserve a screenshot. And the fifth floor is the last floor. A long hallway that will lead us to where Tiamat and the Wind Crystal is. This hallway is the location of a very special enemy...


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...MOTHERFUCKING WARMECH (AKA Death Machine). THIS WAS THE MOTHERFUCKING ORIGINAL FINAL FANTASY SUPER BOSS THAT WASN'T ACTUALLY A SUPER BOSS BUT IT IS CONSIDERED ONE

Warmech, as it is known on the NES version, was the strongest enemy in the entire game, rivaling even the last boss in attack power. In the Dawn of Souls version however, it is not the strongest enemy anymore. There is a 3/64 chance of fighting against it, which may require some walking back and forth (which I did) to fight it. I first fought Warmech in the NES version, and I didn't know that it was supposed to be a rare fight, since I stumbled upon it all the time when I played through this part. I think the encounter was bugged in that version, if I recall correctly, making you fight it all the time instead of being something rare.

However, Warmech is no match for the Dawn of Souls Warriors of Light, who have faced and defeated much stronger foes and obtained stronger equipment than the normal ones, so it goes down in 2-3 turns.

Now, it is time to face Tiamat, hands down the fiercest opponent in the game. Seriously, check this battle out. Stop everything you are doing now and watch this right now.





SO FUCKING HARD HOLY SHIT I AM SWEATING ALL OVER

So yeah, it turns out that Tiamat is not very resistant against petrification. Who knew? I surely didn't because after seeing that message about Tiamat having "no known weaknesses" I checked if she (yep it's a female) really had any weaknesses. Turns out that she does have a weakness. Actually, I think she barely has any resistance to most status effects at all.


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And now, finally, all of the crystal are restored to their former glory! So... did we complete our mission or what? Did we finish the game yet? No? Oh well.
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It is time for the last bonus dungeon of the game, folks: The Whisperwind Cove. BUT FIRST! We have to get something!


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Remember the adamantite we got on the Flying Fortress? We have to get it back to Smyth in Mount Duergar so he can craft us the ULTIMATE WEAPON: EXCALIBUR!

... Except it is not the ultimate weapon by far. If one were playing through the game without entering the bonus dungeons, this would be the second strongest weapon in the game, seconded only by the Masamune. But as I have been doing the bonus dungeons I already have weapons that are stronger than Excalibur. So, what was the point of getting it, then? Because I can, that's why.

Next, we are to go to the Whisperwind Cove proper. Its location is close to the Cavern of Ice where we went to get the Levistone for the airship.


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This dungeon is by far and away the biggest one in the game. It has a whopping 40 floors (!!!!) where you can face some bosses from Final Fantasy VI. As I am feeling merciful, I will not describe all of the dungeon's floors, mainly because there are many of them that are just there for padding and are very small. Instead, I will only mention the most interesting floors. Let's get this started.


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Already at the first floor of the dungeon, and it is already an interesting one, perhaps one of the more visually interesting of all dungeon floors. In this floor, we are in some sort of overworld, along with the main theme of the game playing on the background.

We appear to be floating in the sky, as you can see by the clouds in the background. What I found most interesting about this floor was the color palette they used. Like purple water and a brown-ish grass. I like it.


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The fifth floor is another interesting one. Apparently we are in some sort of afterlife for some of the creatures we killed. If we talk to them, they will say something and then disappear. According to an old man there, they cannot find true rest, and asks us to listen to what they have to say. Sure, why not?

The monsters have some interesting dialogue, I must say. It kinda makes me think about them differently, instead of just cannon fodder and a source of Gil and Exp. Maybe they had families, they had lives and then they were killed by the Warriors of Light. Who is the villain here?

Also, we can find two of our old friends here too: Astos and the Vampire. You remember them, right? Astos was that crazy Dark Elf that was disguised as a king and we later killed it. When talking to them, they will be shocked that we are there and will challenge us to battle. The fights are pathetically easy, ending in just one attack. I guess it goes to show how strong the Warriors of Light have become. I find this interesting, because there is a feeling of real progression. Amusingly enough, the fights are still treated as boss battles, so they get the boss music and the boss death animation, even knowing that will die in one hit.

After we talk to all of the spirits there, the exit to the next floor appears.


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The ninth floor is... bizarre, in a good way, to say the least.

There are many beavers roaming around the floor. If you talk to them, they will say some variant of "snook snook, chit chit", but if you talk to the old man first you will be able to make them go where the old man is asking. For example, I needed 7 beavers at the room on the right. All I need to do is talk to a beaver and choose the "Right" option, and the beaver will go there automatically.

After we have made the beavers enter the correct rooms the old man will thank us and open an exit to the next floor.





At the tenth floor, we can face Typhoon/Typhon from Final Fantasy VI. Every ten floors, we will face a boss. This means that all of the bosses within the dungeon will be faced in a single run, instead of having to enter the dungeon again to fight all of them. This is much better, even considering the fact that the dungeon has 40 floors.

Typhoon isn't a hard boss. Its most dangerous attack is Snort, which can instantly kill a party member. If you have protection against death, like Protect Rings for example, these attacks are harmless and you are free to bash away Typhoon to death. Be aware that sometimes the attack can work and kill your party member, regardless if the character has a protection against death. I know it because it happened when I fought him another time.

After you defeat a boss, like in every other bonus dungeon, you have the ability to exit it or just keep going. I kept going, of course.


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The fourteenth floor is another interesting one. It is a village of fairies, where they can help you, or hinder you. Some of them can heal your party members, while others can do things like draining your MP to zero, or leave your HP to 1. There is no way to know which fairy will be a good one or not, only after talking to them. If the fairy is bad, then its color palette will change to a black one.

The fairy that we helped earlier in the game lives here, as well.

I talked to all of them and thanks to that I managed to completely screw myself and leave me near death, but fortunately I was stockpiled with items and I just healed myself. After talking to one of the fairies, it showed me the exit to another floor.

I don't understand how the geography of this world works.





At the twentieth floor, we can face Ultros / Orthros. He has strong physical attacks that deal around 200 damage, but most of the time he will try to use Ink, which blinds the party if it hits, but it almost never does. It is only a matter of time until Ultros is ultimately defeated.


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The twenty-second floor is some kind of town of mages. Here, you can buy all (or almost all) of the spells that the shops sell during the game. The price of the spells is the same as the ones in the shops, so if you missed any spell or would like another one, here is your chance. I already had all of my spell slots full for all of my characters, so I didn't buy anything.

I accidentaly entered the exit of this floor while I still wanted to explore it a little further. The exit was a normal door to a house that I thought I could enter. Oh well.


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The twenty-fifth floor is interesting, as well. This time, you are in a town full of kids, and you are searching for one that has red hair. The doors to the houses teleport you to another door in the area, so you have to navigate through them like a maze and find the kid you are looking for.

Apparently all of these kids came from our world, the real world, because they comment that they somehow appeared here and make references to Mecha-Bahamut and a Trance Kuja figure. At least that's my theory.

I took some time to find the kid, as these kinds of things always confuse me. After I found the red-haired kid, I returned and talked to the kid who sent me to find him/her. The kid then opens an exit to the next floor.


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The thirtieth floor is a town filled with undead people. The land looks dead, and the people there are living in pain or are unable to move completely, due to some kind of curse that turned them into the undead. The game over theme constantly plays in the background, and the mood is quite haunting. I never got to listen to this track this much before, and it is a somber tune.

As you walk around, you can find an undead guard that will ask us to help them and defeat the creature that is doing this to them.

After you enter the place where the guard said the creature is, we are teleported to an area that looks like the Flying Fortress again, and there we face another boss.





Phantom Train. Not a hard fight, just need to be careful about its Acid Rain attack and heal after it uses it.

Unfortunately, you cannot suplex it.

After we defeat Phantom Train, we return to the town we were before and see that everything has returned to normal. The townsfolk look healthy and the land is green and filled with flowers. Many of them will comment about being undead. Some will say that it was horrible, and others even have the audacity of saying that it wasn't so bad and thinking that being immortal might be a good thing. Yeah, so why were you screaming in pain?

But the best NPC is the one who just screams: "Flowers, flowers, FLOWERS!".

Interestingly, the townsfolk know about Phantom Train and keep wondering where it came from. Why, that's obvious! It came from Final Fantasy VI, of course.





And now we finally reach the final floor and face the final boss of the dungeon: Death Gaze.

It has very strong physical attacks that can almost kill one of the Wizards and almost did so. Otherwise, Death Gaze isn't much of a threat. Just cast Protera and Invisira over and over until you get to a point where you can take his attacks with minimal damage, and if you are hurt just use Curaga.

Ah, yes! Finally all of the dungeons are now completed! I have done all of the extra things I had to do, but it's a pity that I wasn't really rewarded for doing-


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HOLY FUCKING SHIT


Ultima-Fucking-Weapon, bitches. I had never gotten it before, since this is the first time I finished all of the Soul of Chaos dungeons, and fuck I had completely forgotten that it even existed. It is the strongest weapon in the game and can be equipped by all classes. Its damage output is related to how much HP the character that has it equipped has, and so the more HP you have equals higher damage.

I gave it to my White Wizard so he/she (I never really decided on a gender for the characters) can kick some ass too.

But hell yeah, I finally finished all of the bonus dungeons! Now the only thing that's left is to finish the game itself.

The next chapter will probably be the last one of this Let's Play. It will be there that all shall end.
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Amnesia
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This is it, folks. The last chapter of the Final Fantasy I Dawn of Souls Let's Play is finally here.

The Warriors of Light have restored the Crystals and cleared all of the bonus dungeons, but their adventure is not yet over. How can this be?


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If we go back to Crescent Lake where the old sages are located, they will talk about an endless time loop that originated 2000 years in the past. Something, or someone, went back in time 2000 years and caused the sequence of disasters that started 400 hundred years ago.

Now that the crystals are shining again, we now have the power to break through the wall of time, apparently. The one responsible for all of this is 2000 years in the past at the Chaos Shrine. Remember when we saw the crystal energies converging on a single point when we were at the Flying Fortress? That is the Chaos Shrine, where we first faced Garland, the geographic center of the four crystal altars and where their energy gather. Now that the energies of the crystals are flowing freely, we can use the crystals' power to go back in time and face the root of the problem.


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Ah... That's quite nostalgic. This is where our whole adventure began, and this is where it all shall end.

This was where we first faced Garland at the beginning of the game. Remember those bats? We can now actually talk to them. Here is what they say:

Bat 1
 
"The curse of the Fiends changed us into this form and prevented us from speaking. The light of the crystals has enabled us to speak again!"


Bat 2
 
"We are Sky People. We came to this shrine in our attempt to locate the source of the world's ruin. That was four hundred years ago..."


So these fellas have been here all of this time, and we could never understand them before. Fuck, imagine being a bat and stuck in the same place for 400 years. What's worse is that they are probably the only survivors of their people.

Bat 3
 
"The power the four Fiends were absorbing from the Crystals was being fed into the past by the Black Crystal. The one distorting the beautiful light of the Crystals is the one we've been looking for all along. The true root of evil lies just ahead..."


The other two bats will say that with the light of the 4 Crystals we can open a time portal on the Black Crystal at the center of this very room. The Warriors of Light waste no time in activating the portal.


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The Dark Crystal shines brightly and then disappears, leaving behind a warp for us to enter.


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We are now 2000 years in the past. This is when the time loop begins, and we have come to stop it from happening ever again.

The Chaos Shrine now looks clean and repaired, instead of the ruins we know from the future. The random encounter rate in this place is more absurd than anything else the game has thrown this far. It is so bad that sometimes you only take one step and you enter another battle.

The amount of gil and exp that we gain here is also absurd as well. You can easily level up 10 levels in this place by simply trying to get to the end of the dungeon. The enemies here are mostly different from what we've seen before. They are actually recolors of previous enemies, but many of them are unique to this area. We are in the past, after all.

The first floor doesn't have anything interesting, in treasure or anything else. There are two stairs in this floor. One leading to the upper floor and one leading to the first basement floor. You can't proceed through the dungeon if you go through the basement through this floor, so you will need to go up.


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At the third floor we find a room with a stone slab in front of us.

Remember the Lute key item that we got when we rescued the princess at the beginning of the game? No? Well, I don't blame you, since the item is barely mentioned through the game and you only use it here in the game.

The Warriors of Light will then play the Prelude theme on the lute and the stone slab will move, revealing a ladder to the lower floor. Using this passage, we can reach the basement floors and proceed through the dungeon.


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At the first basement floor, near the stairs that lead to the second basement floor, we get into a battle with our old friend Lich, the Fiend of Earth, and the first Fiend we defeated in the game.

No, you're not missing anything. Lich doesn't have a sprite in the dungeon where you can talk to it and initiate battle. It is a fixed encounter.

This is the Lich from the past, not the one from the future that we defeated. So it doesn't remember us. However, somehow it is a little bit stronger than the Lich we face in the future, but the Fiend is no match to the Warriors of Light now. Especially since my White Wizard has fucking Ultima Weapon now, and he deals more damage than the Knight now.

The battle ended very quickly, and Lich will never be seen again.


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At the second basement floor, near the stairs that lead to the third basement floor, we can face Marilith, the Fiend of Fire, who is also easily defeated by our party and also CHECK OUT THAT FUCKING WHITE WIZARD KICKING HER FUCKING ASS

There are a couple of treasures around the dungeon that I could get, but there is only one treasure that I'm looking for.


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At the third basement floor, near the stairs that lead to the fourth basement floor (noticing a pattern here?), we can kill Kraken, the Fiend of Water. Again.

Seriously, these guys are treated as boss fights, but they don't even have sprites on the map and don't even have flavor text. They die in less than a minute. I guess this shows how strong the Light Warriors have become. I entered this dungeon and I was around level 82-5-ish and by the time I was near the end I was at level 90-something. I wasn't kidding when I said that the battles here give an absurd amount of exp and gil.


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At the fourth basement floor, near-HOLY SHIT THE MASAMUNE

Before being one of the weapons used by Sephiroth (and also Frog from Chrono Trigger but it doesn't really count), the Masamune was used by the goddamn Warriors of Light themselves. It is one of the strongest weapons in the game and can be equipped by all character classes.

The only character that wasn't already a death machine by this point was my Black Wizard, so I gave the Masamune to him.

We are now invincible.

In this floor we can also face Tiamat, the Fiend of Wind, but really, it doesn't even deserve a screenshot. My party is goddamn invincible. It will invariably die. The truth is that there are some differences between these Fiends and the ones that we faced in the future (fuck time travel confuses me), like status resistances and the like, but it is not really important.

And now, at last, we arrive at the final floor of the dungeon.





Yes, it was Garland all along. I'm shocked! I never imagined that this would happen at all. Nope.

Garland somehow died, but didn't die. He was then teleported to the past by the Fiends where Garland later send them to the future so that they could send him into the past again, creating a time loop. At some point, Garland became very powerful and became Chaos. Garland later loses all of his memories somehow and everything happens again.

Although this kind of plot is a cliché these days, it was something new for JRPGs. However, the plot was somewhat confusing to me, especially during the first time I played the NES version. Here are some points that I think are not explained in the game:


  1. If Garland became Chaos, why didn't he just rule the world back then? Certainly, he was very powerful, even more than the Fiends, so what did he do exactly during the time that he was Chaos?
  2. Why did Chaos become Garland again in the future? And why did he lose all of his memories?

I also remember being confused about whether this would happen all over again. I thought that the Warriors of Light would have to do all of this again for all of eternity, because of the time loop, but now I understood that the time loop was broken.

In the NES version, the battle did not have its own battle theme, using only the normal battle theme instead, but as new ports were released they made a track for the boss fights.

Chaos as a boss fight is still somewhat hard, even for a party like mine. His physical attacks pack quite a punch, and he also has access to the best spells in the game. I used NullAll to halve the spell damage and used the same strategy as I tend to use on bosses, except this time I didn't spam Protera and Invisira, but made my Black Wizard use Healara using a magical staff. Chaos was then finally defeated and peace was restored.

And so... the tale finally ends. This was a wild ride that took a long time to finish, but now I have finally completed it.

It is a pity that no one will ever remember the stuggle of the Warriors of Light, but their story will live on, whether by legends, or old stories. Perhaps people like the Warriors of Light existed in our world, but are now forgotten by history.


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BUT THE FANTASY IS NEVER TRULY FINAL!
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Amnesia
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  • Let's Play successfully completed

Can someone please move this over to the screenshot let's play forum? Thanks.
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krayon
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Well that took a while to read, but it was very good! You put a lot of work in to that, pat yourself on the back :D
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Amnesia
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krayon
May 18 2014, 03:08 PM
Well that took a while to read, but it was very good! You put a lot of work in to that, pat yourself on the back :D
Thanks, I appreciate it.
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PelvicSorceror
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Dude, I really appreciate what you've done here. I love to hate the game, and I thought you did a great job playing it. I'm brand new and getting ready to start posting, and I'd love it if you could help me out. The first game I'm gonna LP is Monster Party on NES. Thanks for a great play, and I hope to see more from you.
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Raxby
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Moved to Abandoned Archive.
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