Final Fantasy Adventure: Leveling System

When I think of the action-adventure genre I tend to think of the Zelda series of games. You wander around with a variety of weapons beating up a variety of monsters and solving some puzzles. Maybe you can get better by getting better gear or some extra health but that's about it. So I was a little surprised when, after killing a bunch of monsters, I leveled up.

I did some reading (on Wikipedia, mind) and it claims there's a different genre entirely called action-RPG. Which is basically the same thing as action-adventure with a leveling system. I guess in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised at all. What is Dead Rising, after all? Or Devil May Cry, which I even mentioned a couple days ago!

At any rate when I leveled up in Final Fantasy Adventure I had a choice to make when I leveled up. There are apparently four stats in the game (stamina, power, wisdom, and will) and you get to choose a focus stat each time you level up. You gain 4 stats each level - always a fixed 2-1-1-0 split with the 2 and 0 determined by the stat you choose.

Stamina - 2 stamina, 1 power, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Power - 2 power, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Wisdom - 2 wisdom, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power
Will - 2 will, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power

So you're guaranteed to gain stamina and will every level. You can only get one of power or wisdom each level. I found all this out with some trial and error in game, but the question then was what do these stats actually do? There didn't seem to be anything in game that would tell me, but I did my first 14 levels without looking things up. My best guesses for what the stats do:

Stamina - increases maximum health. I knew this for sure since my max health got bigger when I took a stamina level.
Power - increases physical damage done. I knew this was pretty likely since I could start killing mobs in 1 hit instead of 2 after leveling up. That could have been a function of just level but it seems more likely to be based on power.
Wisdom - I never took a level in wisdom and my maximum mana never went up. I'd guess the two are linked.
Will - I have no idea here. My guess would be it makes your spells more powerful.

I also definitely took less damage as I leveled up so some stat likely impacts damage taken. Which one? Stamina seems likely but I could see will doing it too. And maybe even power!

At any rate, after 10 power levels and 4 stamina levels I decided to turn to the internet and find out what the stats do. Power does exactly what I thought it did. Stamina too, except it also impacts damage taken. Wisdom increases maximum mana and the potency of spells. Will impacts how fast that silly little bar on the bottom of the screen fills up.

What does that bar do? I didn't really know before looking that up either. From Secret of Mana I remembered that you could charge up a weapon to do a special attack with it. This bar fills constantly and is depleted when you hit the attack button so it seemed likely to be powering up my attacks. Once I even threw my axe across the screen which came as a bit of a shock. (And meant I couldn't attack until it fell off the edge of the screen which sucked!) It turns out that's precisely what the bar does. Attacking with a weapon is different based on weapon type and how much charge you have. None of the abilities seemed terribly interesting and the axe one actually seemed detrimental! The sword one looked like it could have uses if only because the default sword attack is so abysmally bad. Part of me wants to experiment with the sword attacks but I actually vendored my starting sword already. (I hope this game isn't like the Manders RPG!)

At any rate, now that I know what the stats do, I'm quite happy with my stat up choices. Will seems like it actively hurts the way I play so I don't want to pick it. Picking wisdom means I don't get power (and vice versa) so it feels like I should focus on one or the other but not both. I haven't seen a reason to cast a spell that wasn't cure and even then I'm selling off consumable healing items so I don't need more mana to cast more heals. So I mostly just want stamina to survive more and power to beat down harder!

Warwick Level 1 Skill

For the longest time I would take Warwick's Q ability first when heading into the jungle. It does some damage and provides some healing so it seems pretty sweet. I saw a guide that said to take his W first but didn't explain why. I decided to try it out and liked it, though I want to math it out to see if it's actually better or not.

What exactly do they do?

Q: Hungering Strike: Does 75 damage. Heals for 60. Has a 10 second cooldown.

W: Hunter's Call: 40% attack speed boost for 10 seconds. Has a 30 second cooldown.

By default at level 1 Warwick will attack .665 times per second. With the attack speed buff up he'll attack .931 times per second. Over the course of the 10 second buff this will be a gain of 2.66 attacks. Each attack hits for 80 damage and heals for 18.

On the surface that seems worse. You get to Q 3 times before the W comes off cooldown so you're comparing 225 damage and 180 healing with 213 damage and 48 healing. But that assumes you're constantly in combat the entire time. If you spend some time fighting and some time running between fights then things change. You're still going to gain on healing with the Q but the W is probably going to do more damage.

Now, to be fair, the replay I looked at where I did this I started with a long sword as my first item which adds 10 damage to each attack. I find I don't have any trouble with dying since the last patch (I don't even drink a healing potion anymore) so trading some healing for some damage seems strong. I'm going to stick with W as my first skill for now on!

Final Fantasy Adventure: First Thoughts

I've put a few hours into Final Fantasy Adventure so far and I'm enjoying the game to this point. It definitely feels like Secret of Mana. I've found a wide variety of weapons which are used to overcome different world obstacles. The axe chops down trees. The sickle cuts tall grass. There's a grappling hook style thing which can be used to fly across pits assuming you find a post to latch onto. There have also been AI controlled helpers. Not to nearly the extent as in SoM (where they were actually fully formed characters who could be controlled by other people) but they're still hanging around and helping out. The game even starts in a similar matter with a fall from the waterfall near the mana tree.

It's not all roses, however. You get to equip two items. One of your many weapons and a miscellaneous item of some kind. Candy to restore health. A rock chopping item to chop rocks. A key to open a locked door. Or you can equip a spell in that slot. In order to change which item you're using you have to open the main menu, select item, find the item you want in the list, and select it twice. Then if I want to use the item I need to hit another button in the main game. So if I want to heal myself with a candy I need to hit at least 5 buttons and some directional presses on the item menu. If I want to open a locked door I need to do the same thing. For keys in particular it feels like the game should just know I have keys in my inventory and automatically use one when I walk into a locked door.

Items don't stack and I only have 16 item slots in my inventory. Right now 6 of my 16 slots are holding cure potions that I will likely never use. In the last dungeon I had to discard probably a dozen things in order to open treasure chests filled with stuff I then threw away so I could open more chests.

Finally the game only allows character movement in a cardinal direction. The monsters can move diagonally but I cannot. I think this is mostly a problem because I've never really played adventure games with this movement restriction so I keep wanting to react in ways that can't happen. I noticed that same thing when I tried to play the original Zelda recently. It frustrates my mind a little to think I can do something and then fail to  do so due to the controls.

In all it feels like the interface for the game isn't up to snuff but that shouldn't actually be too surprising when dealing with a 20 year old hand held game. I'm pretty sure I can block the annoyances out and enjoy the game. But I must say... I now have a real craving to play Devil May Cry!

On Sportsmanship

Yesterday I got an email from the BPA (the people who run WBC) which had, among other things, this year's nominees for the WBC Sportsmanship award. I took a look to see what sorts of things get nominated and one name really caught my eye. He got nominated for doing pretty much the exact opposite of something he advocated happening 3 years ago. I went on a bit of a rant on here at the time so I figured it would only be fair to point out the change now.

The background is the game Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit. This is a card driven wargame with unbalanced sides. The dark side basically wins by killing everything in site. The light side wins by keep at least 3 people alive while winning a side-game with Anakin. You get to take 4 actions each turn and actions taken with Anakin basically have no game effect. Using actions on Anakin is, I think, very bad. It gives up board position for no real advantage. Eventually you get enough successes and win the game but I think you should establish a strong board position and then work on Anakin.

This means if a game goes long it is almost certainly the light side's fault. Pretty much every action the dark side takes is a direct progression towards winning the game, but if the light side wants the game to last a long time it probably will. In order to make sure games finish in 2 hours they added a rule that if time runs out the light side just loses. If people are playing at a good pace this will never come up but there are a lot of people out there who don't play at a good pace so it does happen.

Three years ago in the semi-finals of the tournament I was playing as the light side. I had completely ignored Anakin in favour of getting good board position and it had worked out. In fact, I was guaranteed to win. I killed every single dark side unit that could attack my guys. I blocked the way in so he couldn't get more reinforcements. Now all I needed to do was advance Anakin and the game was over. I had over an hour to go and it was pretty much impossible that I'd fail enough dice rolls in a row. Unless my opponent started stalling in a way that is incomprehensible.

At any rate my opponent conceded when I established the board lock. A spectator who it turned out had something to gain if my opponent won made a big deal about it. I hadn't actually won yet, he claimed, and I should be forced to roll out those dice because it's possible I'd fail to win 5 coin flips out of the likely 100 I'd be making. He went so far as to call the GM over and the two of them combined managed to convince my opponent to unconcede. And set the game back up. And keep playing in the hopes I'd fail my coin flips. My opponent didn't take any actions and just let me win. (He could have thought about what cards to play. He could have taken actions that wouldn't impact the game in any way but which would involve rolling dice and eating up time.) I won in about 5 minutes.


Here's the nomination for the 2011 WBC Sportsmanship award:

"STAR WARS; QUEEN'S GAMBIT: Three-time champion Larry Lingle had his elimination round game all but won by merely playing out his hand normally, but he didn't want to win by time limits so he passed his own moves, allowing his opponent to beat the clock and win the game as Anakin brought down the death star - knocking Larry out of the tournament."

Larry was the spectator to my game 3 years ago. He's the one who wanted my opponent to abuse the clock in order to win an un-winnable game. He's the one who wanted my opponent to take worthless actions to waste time. And yet here he is, nominated for doing the exact opposite! And by the same GM that forced an undo of a concession and a re-setup of a game! (Though, to be fair, I'm pretty sure he knew that if we just played it out I'd win anyway and was likely just trying to appease Larry.)

Now, maybe things have changed in the last 3 years for Larry. Maybe he's realized what a jerky thing he was advocating 3 years ago and changed the way to approaches the time limit. What I think is a lot more likely is he holds himself to a higher standard than he does other people. He wants to win the right way, within the rules, and doesn't want to win by cheesing his opponent out. But he knows that cheesing people out is possible and wanted to make sure my young opponent was aware of his options. Maybe he thought I'd badgered my opponent into an early concession and was trying to undo my imagined bad sportsmanship? I can respect that!

I know he's a good guy in general. He's a popular GM of multiple events and I had heard a story of him conceding in a different Queen's Gambit game after realizing he'd been inadvertently cheating by moving guys too far after the real Queen died. But I'd painted him in a bad light 3 years ago and I don't think that was very fair in retrospect. I'll never know his motivations at the time and I'm glad to hear he didn't cheese out a win last year!

Final Fantasy Adventure

I was doing a little preliminary reading on this game (mostly to see where it fit in the timeline) and discovered something very interesting about this franchise. The Final Fantasy Legend franchise was actually first released in Japan as the Saga franchise and was rebranded when it was released over here but actually had nothing to do with Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Adventure is the first game in the Mana franchise but was actually originally produced with the Final Fantasy name in Japan.

The first sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure? Secret of Mana. One of the best games of all time! Secret of Mana was a Zelda style adventure game with 3 characters. Normally the second two would be AI controlled (with very limited programming available from a menu) but you could actually use the Super Multitap to hook 3 controllers up to the SNES and have all 3 characters controlled by players. I can still remember my brother playing as the little red haired dude and wanting the axe. (You had one copy of each weapon type so only one person could use a given weapon.)


I had actually played a game in the Saga series: Romancing Saga. I only played it for a brief period of time before turning it off and not going back. I don't remember why I soured on it but I just couldn't get into it for some reason. Maybe that explains why I haven't been a huge fan of the FFL games. They just aren't my style of game? On the other hand I really loved Secret of Mana so I now have high hopes for Final Fantasy Adventure.

I must say I didn't know that Secret of Mana actually is descended from the original Final Fantasy. From the same company, sure, but not that it had such direct ties. Cool!

Final Fantasy Legend II: Conclusions

I finished playing FFLII last night. I have a bunch of random thoughts about the game and I'm not going to hold anything back with regards to the plot so bewarned. If you've been holding off playing a 20 year old game and don't want the ending to be spoiled you should look away!


The character 'Dad' is odd. My main character was a robot but NPCs on different worlds kept commenting on how much I looked like him. He's obviously a human with a pretty cool hat. I'm a giant metal box with random stuff glued on to me for stats. Maybe the box shape is just how my sprite is represented and really I'm an android? But then how can I put on 7 pairs of gloves? 'Dad' is also living at least three lives. He has families on two worlds and a job high up in the military on a third. And can apparently pass through the magi-restricted gates without having enough magi.

At the end of the game I manage to convince him to come home to mother. And then in the ending sequence he gets bored and wakes me up in the middle of the night to say goodbye before he jumps out the window again. He's going to look for the Lost Ark. (I'm also pretty sure he was equipped with a whip when he first joined my party...) My character decides to go with him and then so does the mother. And they all jump out the window instead of using the door despite there being no one to sneak away from anymore!

In all it seems like 'Dad' is a crazy mix of Dr. Soong, James Bond, and Indiana Jones.


Item balance in the game is way out of whack. Near the end of the game I was able to buy dragon armor from the store. It gave immunity to the 4 elements! I'd started encountering monsters that would hit everyone in my party for elemental damage. Each attack would do about 70% of my max health. I'd run into groups with like 10 guys who could cast these spells. Surviving those fights was practically impossible without dragon armor. And completely trivial with dragon armor since I took no damage at all from them. It really feels like the enemies should be scaled down a little so they can't just insta-gib you. And then the gear should be scaled down too so it doesn't make you completely invincible.

In one of the last dungeons I found the weapon Excalibur. In most Final Fantasys this weapon is pretty sweet. In the original FF, for example, it had 13 more and 5 more hit than the sun sword. It was a pretty reasonable damage boost, especially if that 5 hit gave you an extra swing. But since a lot of your damage came from stats and level it wasn't really unreasonable. (Masamune was a much bigger boost in that game, especially since any character could use it.) In FFLII, however, Excalibur is really over the top. Most weapons in the game require you to have high agility in order to hit and high strength in order to do damage. A couple weapons did damage based on agility and is what my human was using. The best one in the game does damage equal to agi*13. Xcalibur does damage equal to str*15. Ok, not such a big jump. Very reasonable even, especially since it uses a new stat and you still need agility to hit with it, right? Turns out no. Xcalibur is guaranteed to hit when you attack with it. So even with 1 agility you'd be hitting every time. Oh, and if your strength stat is less than 70 it's actually treated as being 70. The max stat for a human is 99. My human didn't even have 70 agility and had spent the entire game attacking with an agility weapon! On top of the weapon not being able to miss, it also can't be blocked. And if that wasn't good enough it also does AE damage and hits all enemies in a group! Oh yeah, and it has infinite uses. The only such item in the game.

My human used to do around 300 damage to one monster, sometimes missing, and sometimes being blocked if they used a defensive ability. Each time I did that it cost me 220 gold. And I had to spend inventory space lugging around extra weapons for when the current one broke. With Xcalibur she started doing around 800 damage to a group of monsters. Every attack. No way for them to avoid the damage. She pointed at one group of monsters and they died.

I'd say a 14-fold damage increase from one weapon on top of quality of life increases from unlimited uses is a bit of a problem. Certainly not balanced!


The final boss was really random. He has three phases. The first two essentially do nothing. The third casts an AE spell on your party that hits for anything from 70-700 with no way to mitigate the damage. That's a damage range that is way too big! My characters had between 600 and 900 max health so the weakest one could just get killed from full if the boss got lucky.

I ended up being sketchy in order to win. I made excessive use of save states in order to play the fight through using my very limited amount of healing at opportune times. I felt like this wasn't really cheating since I could have just gone back to town, bought more healing staves, and won with ease. (I filled my inventory with them but the second last boss had me use up almost all of them. I should have gone back and bought more but I was lazy.)


If I play again I'm going to drop the human from my party. She seemed to gain stats faster than the mutant but not having any non-consumable actions until I got Xcalibur was really annoying. Robots were definitely cool.

Japan Only Games

Yesterday I discovered that Theatrhythm is currently only slated for release in Japan. I want to include it in my marathon but it isn't available in my language or continent. It got me thinking... Are there other games on my list which were only ever released in Japan? It turns out the answer is yes. A surprising number of games (mostly from the Chocobo series) were only sold in Japan. Many of those were put out for mobile phones and weren't even on any console at all. While I can hold out hope that Theatrhythm will still get ported to the NA region there's no chance that any of those older games are going to make it.

The first time I did a Final Fantasy marathon I played just the core games in the series, but at that time FFIII had only ever been released in Japan. I played it by finding a fan translated rom for the game and playing it in an emulator. Not exactly on the up and up, I know, but I didn't really see a viable other choice. If they'd released the game over here I would have bought it for sure. (And once they did release it on the DS I did just that!)

I'm still several games away from needing to make a decision but I'm wondering if I can do the same thing with some of these more obscure games. Are there emulators for Japanese mobile phones? Did someone bother to translate Choco-Mate? How about "Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Special" which is apparently a Monopoly spin-off! What about the 3DS? Do emulators for it exist? Can my computer run them if they do? All things to look into as I move forward!

If it turns out they aren't available I won't be too disappointed. I'm unlikely to 'finish' Final Fantasy XI, for example. I probably won't even play FFXIV at all. The Chocobo game on Facebook is not great (though I may try it again in a few months to see if they've made any improvements) so I'll probably skip it. If I end up not playing the Chocobo Dice game it really won't be the end of the world.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy

I was updating my list of all Final Fantasy related games yesterday and noticed a new game that's coming out in February of 2012: Theatrhythm! The name is a portmanteau of theatre and rhythm and the game appears to be a 'tap the touch screen' game in the style of Elite Beat Agents or Beatmania.

The interesting twist? All the music in the game is from the Final Fantasy series. 50+ songs, apparently! Each of the 13 core games will have at least three songs. One for battle, one for an event (like the dance scene in FFVIII), and one for the field. The following trailer shows a bunch of clips of each of the three types. Including One Winged Angel!



Now for the bad news... It's currently only slated for release in Japan. Square-Enix did trademark the name in the US so there is some hope that they'll announce an English version of the game in the future but for now my hopes were merely raised and then dashed on the rocks.

I entertained the idea of importing a copy of the game from Japan. It's a music game so I can't imagine the language of the game really mattering all that much. Unfortunately it turns out Nintendo put region locks on the 3DS. Even if I had a copy of the Japanese game I wouldn't be able to play it unless I also had a 3DS from Japan. I really want to play this game but I don't know that I want to play it so badly that buying a second 3DS makes sense. Probably I'm just going to have to be patient and hope they release it over here since it seems awesome.