I failed to take my laptop power cord with me to WBC so I was unable to play any Final Fantasy at all while I was down there. I did play a little bit before I left and discovered a little bit about the level up system, as it were. After a couple of fights the enemy I killed (a lizard) dropped meat and I was presented with the silliest question ever. Do you want to eat meat of lizard? DO I?!? Kill things, eat them, take their stuff! Most game leave out the eat them part but here was finally a game where I could eat my enemies.
Now, what do you think eating meat of lizard would do for you? I was thinking it would restore health, possibly damage health. Maybe it would even give a stat up. Lizards are agile, right? Eating meat of lizard could totally give extra agility. I can envision a game where different races get different boosts from eating different kinds of meat... Maybe I could even build such a system! I say that because that's unfortunately not the system in Final Fantasy Legend.
It turns out that when my albatross eats meat of lizard he gets polymorphed into a goblin. Permanently. He did get set to full health which was nice, and since goblins have a different base attack than albatrosses do he also got all of his action points restored. They both have the same max health and similar total stats so it was mostly a sidegrade but with the full health and action points and the slightly better stat split (who wants agility, really?) it wasn't a bad deal. Of course now his name makes absolutely no sense but I'll get over it.
I continued along, following the 'plot', and got some meat of goblin. I tried feeding it to one of my goblins and nothing happened. Frowns. Next I got meat of zombie. My redbull was getting a little low on health so I fed it to him. Since nothing was a possibility I imagined it couldn't hurt. Possibly it would make him better, possibly it would sidegrade, probably it would do nothing. Unfortunately that analysis was wrong. He turned into a skeleton. With 67% less maximum health and substantially worse stats. He went from attacking for 17 to attacking for 2.
This seemed terrible but I was near a boss fight so I pressed on. The boss had an aura so that when you hurt him you became poisoned. On the plus side my skeleton attacked for 0 so he never got poisoned. On the minus side he attacked for 0 (as did another of my characters) and therefore I couldn't possibly win.
I hadn't saved (why would I with my best character getting ruined) so when I play again I need to start over. Part of me wants to make a huge chart showing all possible race/meat combinations. (I'm playing on an emulator so I can use save states to make that a little less daunting.) Or I can give it on playing it pure and look for said chart on the internet since I'm sure someone has to have made one by now. I'm leaning towards the internet at this point but don't intend on playing again until after Magic Nationals so I have some time to mull it over in my head.
1 comment:
When you made four monsters I cringed. That's kind of the "hard mode" for the game.
The monster leveling system is very strange. Basically there are different monster families, each having a number of members from levels 1 to 14 (but not covering all the levels - I think each monster family only has 5 or 6 members). Your current family + the family you eat from determines your new family (so if you are a goblin of any level and you eat a skeleton of any level, you always turn into the same family). The level of that family you get is determined by the higher of your current level and the level of the monster you just killed.
*However* if there is not a monster of that level in the family you are supposed to go to (say you just ate a level 4 meat and turned into a member of the fish family but the fish family has no members of level 4) it will try to make you one level higher. If the family also has no member of that level, it will put you to the highest level member of the family that is below your target level.
Because families only have a few members spread out over 14 levels (and all families have members of level 13 and 14, so really its 4 members spread over 12 levels) there are lots of big gaps, which means you often end up levelling down when you eat. In order to have a reasonable chance against bosses you need to be higher level than the random monsters in the area, which means either looking at tables or a lot of experimentation (save states will help a lot with this).
The game doesn't actually require you to go to the guild, so you can venture out by yourself, and having done both I'd say one human/mutant is easier than four monsters, with the possible exception of the very end of the game (where you have 2 level 14 monsters). Of course I did with pre-internet and without save states (though with a friend doing it at the same time so we could compare notes). With internet it's probably not that bad.
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