The Final Fantasy Legend: Melt!

Last night I reloaded an older save state near a town and filled my inventory with elixirs. Then I headed back up to Ashura trying my best to turn into a pudding or a sandworm on the way up. I didn't turn into a sandworm but I did get a pudding and I figured I'd give the fight a shot with one pudding along with the rest of my team.

I don't know the math behind it, but melt seemed to do around 5 times as much damage as a normal attack and more than twice as much as the best attacks I could find. It has no damage type and isn't a melee attack so it can't be halved or negated by any resistances so on Ashura it would do about 10 times as much damage as some of my other characters and 4 times as much as my best attacks. Couple that with the fact the pudding has 20% more health and takes half damage itself from any melee attack and you can start to see how a team of puddings could win. But one pudding? How did that happen? I mean, he needs to attack probably 6 times to kill Ashura and likely dies in 3 swings. A couple of his attacks do nothing so I could maybe see getting lucky but this seems worse than some of the solo thief fights.

Wait, what's that? Melt heals the pudding for an amount equal to the damage done? So not only does he do 10 times as much damage as some of my damage dealers he also heals for 180% of what my healer can do? Oh. Ok, yeah, I can see how the pudding can trivially solo Ashura.

It's like I was playing vanilla World of Warcraft with a party of 3 fury warriors and a ret paladin healing between fights. And then a death knight showed up and was bigger, tougher, did way more damage, and had a silly amount of self healing. He was going into the dungeon to solo some bosses and decided to let some of the other people tag along for achievements.

I then plowed through the final dungeon leveling each of my guys up to tier 14. (The level designer apparently went on strike during the creation of the final dungeon since it consisted of the exact same floor repeated over and over.) I ended up just fooling around and got stomped by the final boss since it turns out he hits the team for about 400 damage every round. So I had to reload a little earlier and build some tier 14 monsters that had melt which made him trivial.


Overall I was not a big fan of this game, but I think the problem is more with how I chose to play the game than it is with the game itself. Random encounters that can't help you progress in any conceivable way are annoying and the 4 monster party is pretty much set up to play the whole game that way. I didn't want to wander around in dungeons to look for treasure because I couldn't use the treasure and it only hurt to get into fights... And if you're not going to look for treasure and kill stuff why are you even playing a jRPG?

Monster balance is atrocious. Melt in particular is a real problem. It was rare to find a random encounter that was not either trivial or dangerous which isn't terribly fun, but with consumables the dangerous ones weren't so bad. If there was a reason to fight them it might have been ok.