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
Catching up a few months late but I just finished this section last night.
I ended up doing three excursions into the dungeon. The first time I took the bottom path and actually made it all the way to the room with the crown. However, I got absolutely 全滅ed by the monsters guarding the chest, and decided whatever loot was in there wasn’t worth it.
Second time I took the top path and after a bit more time it dawned on me that the key item I need is probably in the chest being guarded by the strongest guys in the dungeon
Third time I came back, after picking up some stronger spells and managed to one hit kill them all with Thundara and successfully retrieved the crown.
Bringing back the discussion about resource management, I typically agree with JupiterJesus regarding the fun challenge in games like P5 and Metaphor of clearing the dungeon in a single attempt. Since this game doesn’t have a time limit like those ones, however, I didn’t feel compelled to do it all in one go. Maybe if the dungeon was one long, continuous route and was more of a pain to get out once you’re deep inside, but it felt like the dungeon was broken up into two halves specifically to allow the player to return to town if they needed to. I availed myself to this opportunity and filled out my red mage’s spell list.
The enemies of this week were interesting. If I remember right, the piscodemons had a sprite on the map in the GBA version to warn you of a fight so I wasn’t expecting them this time. They hit hard but I managed to take them out. In comparison, Astos missed an attack then cast Haste on himself then died having done nothing of value. lol He has a much bigger role in Stranger of Paradise so I forgot how much of a throwaway villain he is in this.
This week I really started to feel the the downsides of moving so quickly. I ran into words I didn’t know, but were already in my Anki deck. I just hadn’t had a chance to review them yet since I’m adding so many cards but limiting myself to 10 new terms a day to avoid oversaturating myself. Maybe I’ll start taking weekends off or something. lol I’ll probably take some time off once I finish the game until I go through all the cards once before starting FFII.
Don’t overthink the mining process. If a word comes back a lot you’ll remember it through sheer exposure. Lookups slow you down, so it’s always frustrating, but it’s also a great way to build vocabulary. If it feels frustrating, just slow down, there’s no rush. It took me 8 months to finish my first game in Japanese in 2023.
Iterating over the content can be valuable too. You can try replaying the Cornelia section and see how much you remember.
Don’t put pressure on yourself to hit an arbitrary deadline, it’s going to make the game feel like a chore.
It hasn’t gotten to the point of being truly frustrating, just minor annoyance, so I’m not too worried about burning out yet. I have been toying with the idea of playing it again at a later point to see if I can do any better than the first time around. I’m motivated to catch up to the main group but maybe I’m being a bit overzealous. I’ll get there someday.
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.
