Final Fantasy 1 Beginner Club W03
| Week 03 | 2025-09-12T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | 💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 2 |
| Next week | 💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 4 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF1BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
Time to explore the land beyond the bridge! Don’t forget to pack some potions and antidotes because the difficulty is about to climb a notch.
This week’s objective is to get yourself a vehicle, but don’t use it just yet.
More details
There are two new places you can visit: Matoya’s Cave and Pravoca. You won’t be able to do much at Matoya’s Cave but it’s probably worth investigating what’s going on there, it’ll become important later.
Pravoca is a town where you’ll be able to purchase new gear and spells, and its denizens need your assistance. See if you can help.
Map
Miscellaneous
The bridge
The true boss of this week is the wall of text that’s going to hit you when you attempt to cross the bridge and can’t be paused. Make sure to check the spreadsheet if you want to take your time to break this appart, but also feel free to leave that for later, it’s all flavor text without any specific info.
You may want to check this only after you’re done with this week’s exploring:
The Peninsula of Power
If you’re not playing the Pixel Remaster, the so-called Peninsula of Power also becomes accessible this week. This isn’t a real place but rather a glitch that exists in most versions of the game.
You probably noticed that the type of enemies you encounter changes depending on your location on the map. The game does this by splitting the entire world map in a large square grid, and when an encounter triggers the game checks in which square you are and fetches the encounter table for this location. Here’s what the grid looks like where we are (courtesy of fforigins, but be warned that the page contains spoilers):
Note that this is the grid for the original NES/Famicom version of the game, it changes a bit from version to version.
If we look at the Cornelia area, where we spent our first two weeks, you can see that it’s broken down in 4 squares: one with the town and the port to the south, a big one that contains the castle and the path to the northern part, then one containing the shrine and finally a small chunk to the west of it.
The encounter tables for these regions is as follow:
- Southern part: only Goblins;
- Middle part: Goblins, Goblin Guards, Wolves and Crazy Horses;
- Northern parts: Same as middle + Skeletons and Black Widows (presumably coming from the shrine).
This is a simple system and you can see that it may lead to oddities: there’s a chunk of land to the south-west of Matoya’s Cave that has the same encounters as the region around the Chaos Shrine for instance. But usually it’s not too noticeable: regions that are close to each other will also usually have similar encounter difficulties, so it’s not super noticeable if some monsters “spill over” to a neighbouring region.
There is one specific spot in FF1 where this isn’t true however: if you look at the grid map above and you go to the last square to the east, you’ll see that there’s a narrow cape that juts out to the north and ends up in the same square as the continent on the other side of the ocean. The reason that this matters is that the region to the North is only accessible much latter in the game, and therefore its encounter table contains much stronger enemies! As a result this small location became known as the “Peninsula of Power”.
These encounters are extremely difficult to win at this point of the game, so you’ll probably want to stay clear from this location, but if you do manage to win you’ll be rewarded by an immense amount (for that point in the game) of XP and gil:
This glitch exists in most versions of the game but was fixed in the Pixel Remaster.
Participation
- I’m playing along
- I will catch up later
- I’m still playing but I haven’t reached this section yet
- I’m a filthy preplayer but I’m here for the discussion
- I understood what the brooms were saying without looking it up
- I did not understand what the brooms were saying without looking it up
. And yeah the two monks help as well, although my red mage is high-maintenance.
not a filthy preplayer anymore!
