It's a little weird to start a series off of the second game but it turns out the original game was only released in Japan and I'm only playing games I can read on this marathon. It's still leaving me with plenty of new games and old favourites to play so I don't feel too bad about that! I'd never even heard of this game before creating my marathon page and I've gone out of my way to avoid reading anything about it so it's all new to me. I finally got around to starting it up last night. How did it go?
Well, I started off by not hitting any buttons in order to watch the intro movie. It had a cute chocobo wandering around in a cave. He ended up getting chased by a cute behemoth who eventually did battle with a cute dragon. The chocobo took that opportunity to sneak off and camp out with his moogle friend. It didn't give me any idea about what the gameplay was going to be like, but on the plus side it did have a chocoboey song running in the background. Let's see if I can find a youtube video of it...
The game itself started out by having me name the moogle. I'd assumed from the name and the intro that I'd be playing as the chocobo, but fine. The moogle can be named Nick. Then I get to name the chocobo. Bungo almost rhymes with chocobo so he's on the team! Then we stumble upon a MYSTERIOUS dungeon and since the moogle loves treasure they head in to get all the treasure for the moogle. That's right, Bungo. Go get me some treasure!
The game turned out to be a roguelike. I control the chocobo and have an autoattack button. I also have a limited inventory which can contain one shot items like fire books and map cards. I can find loot and food, but everything starts out unidentified. So I can either wait to leave the dungeon to identify it, or I can use an identify card on it, or I can just try it out to see what happens. Considering the incredibly limited inventory space I've just been trying stuff out. As such I'm stuck wearing a cursed weapon until I can figure out a way to decurse it. *sigh*
It really reminds me a lot of zAngband. Enter a dungeon, get a randomly generated floor, kill the monsters to level up and get loot. The twists so far are that the enemies are all cute versions of Final Fantasy monsters (instead of running into the letter p I run into a cute little black mage) and that I have computer controlled NPCs helping me out. The moogle follows behind the chocobo and will autoattack anything that ends up beside him. At one point I got separated from him and ran into a white mage. I got to name her too (hello Jo!) and then she started following me around instead.
I beat the first boss (on level 10 of the dungeon) and the dungeon collapsed into the sea. By this point I'd found the moogle (ok, the moogle tried to steal a crystal and that's what made the dungeon collapse) and the three of us retreated to a nearby town. It's where the white mage grew up, and it turns out she's the only human there and all the monsters are pretty racist against humans which makes her sad.
That's where I left off, but my hope is the town will have a way to decurse these stupid claws so I can swap in something better. Presumably someone in this town will point out another dungeon and I'll go play zAngband in it for a while. Kill a boss, repeat?
What I do know is I like roguelike games, but Ehrgeiz was also a roguelike game and I didn't like it. Mostly because combat tried too hard to be a 3D fighting game and it didn't work out well. In this game I only have an attack button and consumable items which actually feels like less options than Ehrgeiz, but it fits better. I had fun while I was playing it yesterday, so I'm going to play some more today and see what shakes out. I don't like that I can only save with consumable items, but maybe this town will sell more of them? I also haven't died yet, so maybe I don't need to save too often.
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