Final Fantasy

Some games will last forever, if you let them. You expect that in an MMO, but with mobile gacha games – when do you just decide it’s time to move on? I made the difficult decision last night to stop playing Flight Rising. It’s a browser game where you raise and breed dragons. After looking into a similar game that used crypto, I looked around for non-exploitative alternatives, found this game and fell in love with it. The community is awesome, there’s little need to pay money for their currency when they give so much of it away for free; I’ve never come close to running out. But the game made, for me, a fatal mistake; they added a game mode where you have to check in throughout the day. ...

I haven’t played the sequel to my favorite Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy Tactics, in ages. And even when I played it before, back in the Gameboy Advance days, I never got that far into it – the tiny screen just didn’t work for JRPGs for me. So I spent a lot of money getting a Nintendo DS – the one with the GBA slot – and a complete copy of the game, and decided to give it another shot. ...

UltrViolet writes great posts but doesn’t have any comment section on his blog. Sometimes you just have to take that extra step. I’m going to start a new feature in my blog, called “Dear @endgameviable”. It will consist entirely of comments I want to leave on his blog, but can’t. — Tipa of the South Wind (@tipadaknife) October 7, 2021 Once upon a time, I used to do respond to other people’s posts on my blog, every day – almost every day. It was fun. ...

New World has been released for just a week. It is way, way too early to start forecasting any sort of trends from this. Like, that’s ever stopped me before. I repeat this whenever I talk about Google Trends. Google Trends is based solely on what people are searching for, and does not correlate with the actual popularity of the game, the number of players, or anything. It’s just the number of searches on a specific topic in a certain amount of time. I would assume that search terms are connected to a specific topic by the searcher clicking on a relevant link in the search results, but that’s just a guess. That said… ...

Some call me a Warrior of Light. Some call me a renegade. Some call me when Chaos rears its corrupted head. But you can call me Garland. Jack Garland. I’m the one they call when there’s nobody else. Jack Garland? Didn’t we just kill you in Final Fantasy I? And… weren’t you Chaos? I honestly hadn’t heard of this game until Squenix sent me an e-mail talking about the demo. This happens again and again. Cool games that everyone (but me) has heard of, I come to it eons too late, way after it would have made sense. ...

24.8 hours to finish Final Fantasy III. I spent so much time preparing so much for the World of Darkness… and those preparations worked out really well. Here’s how we defeated the Cloud of Darkness and their feckless minion, Xande. Last time I played, I leveled all my warriors up to level 50 by running around the first floor in the Ancient Maze. The Invincible, parked just outside the entrance, was a perfect place to return to for resting, so I could use full power in all encounters without any regard for safety. ...

I didn’t have big goals for tonight. Grind to 50 with the jobs I intend to take on the trip to the World of Darkness. And then… maybe jump into Final Fantasy XIV Online, and try the MMO version of FF3’s final boss. So that’s what I did. Three of the jobs are basically no-brainers. Ninja is the most capable physical attacker in the game. Devout is the best healer, and Sage is the best magical attacker, having access to all black magic, white magic, and summoner spells. ...

I only had time for a short session last night. Time to grasp Real Power in the dungeon of Eureka, and then, just for fun, see what’s at the top of the Crystal Tower… Time to step back and see what I’m going to need to do before I can finish the game. Like most Final Fantasy games – most RPGs of all types, really – there’s a point where you can just forge on to the end of the game, or just dally around working on other goals so much so that the end game isn’t really a challenge. I’m there with Final Fantasy III now. ...

Just one crystal to restore – the Earth crystal. We’ve already restored three of them. How hard could the last one be? Harder than all the rest, combined. You see, it was shattered into a million pieces… and we have to find them all. With our trusty airship, the Enterprise, chained in the harbor “for our own protection”, we were forced to stay in the village we found ourselves in against our will. Seems our crazy stories about the world being drowned beneath the sea and everyone being stone statues caused more than a little concern. BUT IT’S TRUE! we shouted, and then they tried to keep us away from sharp things. ...

I can stop eating Gysahl Greens any time I want. Not like mister “dude, can I like crash on your couch just for tonight? Won’t even know I’m there” there. That was A WEEK AGO, CHOCO-BRO. Our adventures in FF3 continue… Dislike: Mini Final Fantasy III seems to take some kind of obscene pleasure in making the party take on odd conditions to proceed. There’s a couple, but the one I hate most is MINI. This spell, which has to be cast on everyone to make them smaller, and again to make them bigger, turns your party into useless clods. Sure, magic still works, but guess what, I only have one party member with black magic skills. So mostly I am just running away. I did find that I could just un-MINI everyone once they were past the MINI check, but that just takes more spell slots, or liberal use of mallets. Ouch. We were almost killed BY A RAT. ...