Chocobo's Abandoned Dungeon

It's been almost 6 months since I've made any progress in my Final Fantasy marathon. I keep thinking I'm going to start playing Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 again, but it's been so long I feel like I'd need to start over entirely. It was actually a fairly interesting game, and I did a bunch of playing and reading about it since my intro post on the subject, but I never got around to posting what else I'd done or what I'd learned.

It turns out the game has a bit of a crafting system to it. You can throw stuff in a pot and new stuff comes out. It turns out the new stuff is entirely random and isn't based on what you throw in at all and none of it is useful so it's just kind of an annoying thing that exists but shouldn't be used. Then there's crafting weapons and armour and it turns out to be really intricate and require doing all kinds of crazy things. The game has one shot spell books but you get better at casting those spells the more you use them and there's ways to craft things that make the spells better.

Getting killed also isn't a game over in this game. Instead you respawn back in town with an empty inventory but you keep your levels. In some ways this was very good (it was the only way I found to unequip my cursed claw) but in other ways it meant it didn't really matter what I was doing. One of the key features on a roguelike to me is the fear of permanent death should you make a mistake. You died? Time to start over! Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 seems a lot longer than something like FTL though. And it has a lot more RPG elements that build up over longer periods of time.

Was the game fun? Yeah, it was fun. But watching all these people shoot for world record times in games like Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IX, and Final Fantasy X has made me really want to play more Final Fantasy. Not more random passable roguelike with Final Fantasy monsters. So in the interest of spurring things along I'm just going to call this one quits and move on to the next game in the marathon. Chocobo Racing. At least that sounds short. And then it's FFIX!

Finally, I need to rank this game among the rest of them. Well, I didn't finish it. So I think that means it has to go way near the end. It was definitely better than Ehrgeiz and I was so mad at FFLIII for letting me skip a mandatory item that this gets put above that one too. But I think it's got to go below FFL. Sorry Chocobo. Maybe your racing game will fare better.