Yeah gear progression is odd. They even improved it a bit in later versions: I don’t think you can buy the mithril sword in elf town in the Pixel Remaster?
In the original you can and it’s extremely OP compared to basically anything you gain in dungeons for a while.
It’s going to get better as we get towards the second half of the game. I think it’s just that the start is fairly light on dungeon crawling as we’ve seen, but from now on we’re going to get basically at least one dungeon every week, sometimes two.
The swords that my characters are using all came from dungeon crawls, and are significantly better than any of the shops available, so that definitely changes.
Whoa just had a slight revelation about エルフ vs 妖精. The game keeps talking about Elves and Dark Elves. At least, they talk about “Dark Elf King” Astos. I just took it for granted as a title, since I saw no actual Dark Elves in the game, making him seem extra evil. If there are two distinct races with their own kings, the king of the 妖精 could simply be king of ALL the elves, dark and light. He couldn’t call himself king of the エルフ - that’s the king of the elves in Elf Town. So, they used a different word, 妖精, to imply “Elvenkind”, which would be also be a pretty good translation in this case.
It’s possible but frankly the more I think about it the more I think it’s just a stylistic choice that doesn’t have a super deep meaning. I was thinking about that as I was completing the gear list for the next few weeks: you have 炎の盾 (flame shield) but アイスシールド (ice shield). Why not 氷の盾? Or フレイムシールド? After all they also have フレイムメイル (flame mail) and アイスアーマー (ice armour). Clearly consistent naming conventions were not a huge concern and they have no issue mixing European loans with sino-japonic roots willy-nilly. My favourite being ナイトの鎧 (knight armour) instead of 騎士の鎧 or ナイトアーマー.
Also in other news, I won’t be able to generate the vocab list for next week because I don’t have access to my usual computer (and we’re going faster than I initially expected). The full transcript is in the spreadsheet as usual however.
As you can see on the NES/Famicom version there’s a 75% chance that he will cast magic at every turn, and the first spell in rotation is always Death. So if you need more than 3 turns to defeat him you basically will have one of your members killed with overwhelming probability. Your only chance is to luck out and only have him do physical attacks.
Meanwhile in the Pixel Remaster you only have a flat 1/9 chance of death being cast every turn, which means that there’s still over 55% chance that it won’t be cast even after 5 full turns, and 30% after 10.
Oh, for me on Pixel Remaster death was cast turn one and then never again so I sort of thought it was more heavily scripted, heh. My bad luck strikes again.
It’s also possible that the fanwiki ignores some nuances. At any rate in the PR you have access to phoenix down, so death is a lot less threatening than in the original where you lose a party member until your next trip to a nearby church…
Well, even with all the mental preparation for the difficulty of the dungeon, I still had to turn off encounters and run out a few times Actually, turning off encounters got so tempting that I made a rule with myself I can only turn off encounters in a dungeon when I’m escaping, not when exploring, otherwise I feel like I’m cheating.
Trying to catch up after finishing college and what a way to come back. That was such a difficult dungeon! I finished all my health potions and almost all of my cures. As I was trying to get out so I don’t die, I accidentally found what I needed in the dungeon. At that point I then figured out how to toggle the map!
It’s been like 2 months or something since I have played this so I was very excited to have remembered the witch from the beginning! I gave her eyes back and we got the prince up and running again. Also I bought like 50 potions and cures of every type so I don’t run into that again.
This is a very exciting part about diving back into Japanese. It is fun to get some exposure and pore over every word, or when it is 2 am like it is now, I may be guilty of hitting translate for the whole sentence and moving on. Either way, I’ll see you on the next week soon hopefully!
Welcome back! Good job on remember stuff. No worries if you don’t though, that’s the good part about this game, if you wander around because you are lost, then you’ll make your team stronger by getting into more fights
Actually, turning off encounters got so tempting that I made a rule with myself I can only turn off encounters in a dungeon when I’m escaping, not when exploring, otherwise I feel like I’m cheating.
