💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 6

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Final Fantasy 1 Beginner Club W06

Week 06 2025-10-03T15:00:00Z
Previous week 💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 5
Next week 💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 7
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Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:

Stopping point

Once you have talked with the sage Sarda.

The world is going to open up quite a lot over the next few weeks, look at the map below if you want to double-check the place we want to explore this week.

There are quite a lot of small steps involved in this part, read below if you want more detailed instructions.

More details

Last week we have received the “mystery key” from the elf prince, which means that we can finally open all these locked rooms we’ve encountered since the start of the game!

The relevant locations are:

  • Cornelia castle
  • Chaos shrine
  • Elf castle
  • West Castle
  • Swamp cave
  • Dwarf cave

Out of these only one is necessary to progress the game: the treasure room in Cornelia. There you will find a key item that you can bring to the dwarves, in their cave to the west of Cornelia in order to open a new path and reach the town of Melmond!

All the other locked rooms contain more or less useful items that you can decide to fetch now, save for later, or ignore completely. You can always revisit these places at any point during the rest of the game, they remain accessible until the very end.

The rewards in the swamp cave are particularly underwhelming if you don’t want the hassle of returning there. Or if you only prefer returning there in a few weeks completely overpowered for fun.

Once you have reached Melmond you still have some work ahead of you. Talking with the locals should give you some clues as to what you need to do next. If you’re still lost, here’s the summary: Sarda lives in a grotto all the way to the west of the continent, in order to go there you have to pass through a different grotto, but you will find that there is an “obstacle” in the way. In order to pass you need to explore a third grotto to the south to find a key item.

This week will contain our second proper dungeon. It shouldn’t be much harder than the Swamp Cave last week. Take your time, don’t forget your healing items, don’t hesitate to do several runs to progress through the maze.

Map

This is the region we must explore this week. The wise Sarda is awaiting somewhere in there:

melmond
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Miscellaneous

A trip to the lake

While our attention is focused on Melmond and its surroundings this week, there is an other, harder to reach town that also becomes accessible in a different corner of the map. I’m not going to cover it this week because there’s no reason to go there yet (so please be mindful of spoilers if you do decide to “”“scout head”“” this week) but it does have some decent gear and spells if you want to go shopping.

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
0 voters
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💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 7
:gem_stone: Final Fantasy 1 Beginner Club - Home Thread
💎 Final Fantasy 1 - Week 5
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That was a good guess but my excuse this week is not scouting ahead unfortunately. After I was recently challenged in a previous thread to make a bit more money, I decided to check if the gils was capped at 999.999 gils or not, naturally by progressing in the adventure. Well now I know. yes it is capped

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I thought it was capped at 99k. Maybe in the original version? I’ll know soon enough, I’m at 70k.

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It's grottos all the way down (week spoilers)

I love the vibes this week. The dwarves in their cave are really cute, the town might be suffering from blighted land but they have such a cozy Halloween vibe (did the vampires force the inn to be covered in cobwebs? :relieved: ), then a vampire cave full of bats. Such fun. I’m feeling a lot more on top of things now that resources are getting more plentiful; the slots still make you watch what your mages do closely but I’ve got enough that I feel like I can use them more regularly and they’re getting way more useful. Did the dungeon in 2 trips, figured it’d be smart to take a quick rest after clearing floor 1 of treasure.

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I find it interesting how different the max HP is getting between my white and black mage. In my personal conception of the classes, both would just be squishy magic casters, but the white one can take some hits. They feel a little more situational and sometimes like I’m using them as much or more for in between fight patching than I am getting much use out of them mid-fight, so it’s probably a good call to buff them up in another way.

I did indeed manage to just totally miss the dwarf cave when first exploring with the boat, and with that here is where I probably would’ve been wandering around lost for a while without the help of this thread. Though, while how they mark intended progression may not always be super clear, I do like how we’re sailing back and forth all around the place. It feels much more like a big adventure across the world than the way some games would grant a boat as basically just a way to cross the water once or twice to reach a new landmass and then play sort of linearly on that new land. That’s one of the things I’m enjoying most, it’s like a real classic adventure and playing into that vibe well. The dungeon dives are big and wear you down over time, so it’s refreshing to hit the open air again, especially now that the difference in enemy strength inside and outside is widening.

Also most dungeon gear just kept giving me things for the warrior only, guy is spoiled. Maybe it’d be different if I had different classes to share with, but it’ll be nice for people running multiple of them, heh. While gearing up in town, switching people’s body equipment from 服 to 銀の腕輪 is really funny to me that those are the same slot. We’re a party with a couple nudists wearing very nice bangles.

Early on I felt like I was launching the game and closing 20 minutes later but now that there’s more proper dungeon crawling this definitely feels like a good game for this sort of beginner aimed club; we can get in a solid amount of weekly playing with low language density. And if you haven’t yet internalized some of these words, it’s nice how games will really drill their core terminology you deal with in fights and menus into your head forever.

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gear inequality

I should probably have mentioned that all the way at the start but one of the reasons to take a fighter with you is that a lot of very good gear is class locked for them. It’s going to get a bit better eventually, although one of the two best swords in the entire game is warrior-only, which is a bit disappointing.

Then again it introduces an important Final Fantasy game mechanic: top weapons being gated behind absolute bullshit preconditions. Yes I’m still mad about FFXII. I’ll never not be mad about FFXII.

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Gear

Yeah the part that just kinda shocked me and was funny is how often I’d get a sword or something, then the next chest somewhere else would have another sword, for the same guy, sometimes a few points stronger and sometimes with literally identical stats. I don’t mind it that much though; I know the game allows for freely duplicating classes and I think it’s ok for a class identity to be, in part, being good with armor and weapons. It doesn’t make for the most compelling gear system, and it’d really spice things up I found a wizard robe that gives you +1 spell slot or something, but it’s fine.

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Just wait until you get Gauntlet and Healing Rod. The magic users don’t get stuff often, but when they do it utterly breaks the game.

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Wow, I thought I was a pre-player because I went around using the key everywhere I could last week, but it turns out there’s a lot more to do.

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Based on the feedback from last weeks I decided to increase the allowable weekly gameplay as long as the amount of Japanese remains reasonable.

Let me know if I overdid it.

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By the way this week there’s a mystery that must be addressed:

The disappearance of Ido-chan

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Where has the well gone?!

Also the destroyed building to the right is nondescript in the Pixel Remaster but is clearly a church in the original:

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And indeed, there’s no church in Melmond, you have to go to a different town if you need to resuscitate someone.

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Week 6 Play Report

Having already got all the gear and opened up the canal last week (whoops), the party set sail for the open sea at the start of this week. Arriving in メルモンド they learned some shiny new spells with all the money they’d got from the chests. The locals there told them of the Vampire in the earth cave, who was blocking the power of the earth crystal and causing the land to stagnate. The party also heard a rumour about a giant living in a nearby cave who liked to eat rocks, especially gemstones

Back out in the field they first visited this latter cave, and found the giant who said they could not pass. So they went to the earth cave. It took a couple of trips, but they carefully went around collecting all of the treasure and fighting the denizens of the cave. I did quite enjoy that in the cave you fought piscodaemons as regular enemies - just one dungeon back these were being treated as minibosses, but now they’re regular enemies. Nice way of showing the power progression. Plus the shiny new spells were put to good use. Having more uses of wide area clearing fire magic is very welcome. It’s a shame that the black mage wasn’t able to learn Teleport though - that power seems like it would be very useful. Once the party arrived in the vampire’s chambers, the fight began. The black mage was buffing our warrior with haste and ストライ (not sure how this one would be translated tbh) - but the vampire managed to paralyse the warrior in round 2. No worries though because in round 3 a single blast of ファイガ was able to nuke the vampire out of existence

Upon gaining the star ruby, the party headed back out of the cave and to town to heal up. Then set back out for the giant’s cave. They gave it the ruby, and it allowed them to pass. Letting them get to the sage’s cave (a lot of caves, huh). There they obtained the earth staff, which should allow them to get down further into the earth cave and fight the monster down there who is really behind the earth crystal’s disruption

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Building chatter

To be fair, I immediately identified the ruined building as a church here - the fact that it had a steeple was the big tipoff to me. Plus there being someone nearby mentioning how the church specifically was destroyed. So I don’t think it does look all that non-descript

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I forgot that it was mentioned in dialogue. I guess I’m too much of a heathen to tell from the sprites if there isn’t a big cross on it.

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I’m trying to resist playing more, seeing as I’m already ahead of the club, but it’s hard, I have the music in my head all the time…

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Less filthy preplaying more piano practice.

Also playing the Famicom version in parallel forces you to go much slower if you want more.

Or you can play FF3 to prepare that club if you feel like it, I never played it myself.

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Sounds like you need to make another club for some other game series :wink:

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The Xenogears club is less than a month away! That’s going to be a change of pace…

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Ouch, touché :sweat_smile:

That one I have played on Android in 2013 according to my mails. I do remember playing it, but I remember nothing of the story.

This sounded harder to play if you don’t have the proper hardware, could consider following along with youtube playthrough though :thinking:

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You don’t own devices that can emulate the PS1?

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Like, a computer? Maybe I could look into that

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