Week 7
Yeah I’m really liking the sprites, and especially seeing little traces of what will be the design of recurring monsters in the series, starting from those first ones.
The official artwork from Yoshitaka Amano is also incredible!
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Your link doesn’t work for me
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If you cut the end it works but not sure if that’s how it’s intended https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy/images/d/db/Hellhound_ff1.jpg
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Week 7 Play Report
This week started out with the return trip to the earth cave. The party did not delay and set off for the cave immediately. Upon arrival, they descended back to the 3rd floor, fighting the monsters along the way, and used the earth rod to unblock the stairs down. On the next floor they got all of the chests, which got them into a lot of fights and they levelled up. At this point I’d noticed that 猿, my monk, could unequip his weapon to deal more damage. I don’t know if this is related to removing the weapon or the level-up but he also started doing 6 hits per attack now, which has made him a pretty respectable damage dealer - health and defence still aren’t all there yet, but he can pretty reliably hit crits now and using ヘイスト on him to load up on hits makes a lot more sense than it did before
Once they reached the lowest part of the dungeon, they faced off against リッチ, the earth chaos. This fight was an interesting one - had the white mage cast バコルド after seeing it cast ブリザラ on the party, but it didn’t cast it again. Black mage was on buffing duty, getting speed and attack strength up. Think that probably helped when the boss cast slow. But it was the black mage who dealt the finishing blow with a cast of old faithful: ファイガ. Thank goodness there was a teleporter at the end of the dungeon - did not want to have to trek back up 5 floors
After they’d had a rest in town they set sail once again. They investigated the northern lands first, but could find nowhere to land, so they headed for one of the only ports in the south that they could land at and hadn’t been to before. This led to the crescent lake town, and they spent some of their newfound cash on spells, mithril axes, and some shiny new armour for the warrior. Very glad to now have an anti-petrify spell. Feel like the white mage spells at this level are all pretty good to be honest, but I went for ストーナ and プロテア because having a party-wide defence buff sounded very nice to me. Black mage got サンガー and クエイク
Finally, I stopped being dumb and realised that there was a whole bit to the right of town that I’d missed, and this is where the party found a group of sages who did a lore dump. So the chaos of water and wind woke up hundreds of years ago, the chaos of earth only just woke up, and the chaos of fire woke up 200 years early. Makes me wonder what caused the fire chaos to wake up earlier than expected
Also sidenote: still love that they just cribbed the bestiary - this week we got another iconic D&D monster: the ankheg. It’s amazing that this stuff is still in the modern releases of the game really
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The display of that sort of information is definitely better in the Pixel Remaster
Also interesting to notice that the cost is different in PR
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Yeah my understanding is that the original version generally has higher prices. Money is not very difficult to come by at this point though, with many encounters netting over 1k gil, so it’s not too bad.
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That’s freaking amazing.
My (retroactive preplaying play report based on memory):
This is where I first became stupidly overleveled. The zone was so long and had so many enemies. I made my way through most of the dungeon, collecting every chest, skipping no fights (doing reviews during autobattle). I got near the end and ran out of antidotes, so I ran back to town, fighting every battle. I used my stupid new supply of gil to buy 99 of everything so I’d never run out of antidotes again. Then I ran through the dungeon AGAIN. I was already a bit overleveled because of the swamp cave, where I ran through the whole place twice (once for the story, again for the locked treasure rooms). At this point, I’m pretty sure I autobattled Lich to death. Nothing from this point on is even remotely difficult.
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I think I want to prompt a discussion regarding the lore dump at the end of this week, because that’s certainly a big pain point Japanese-wise. It’s also going to be important to make sense of future plot developments.
So, what did you all make of this?
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The Lore Dump
Personally I didn’t find it too bad overall. My understanding is that there are four elemental chaoses which are sapping energy from the four elemental crystals. The crystals are what powers the world so this is generally a bad thing. But the heroes of light will defeat the chaoses and repower the crystals. The chaoses wake up in 200 year intervals, with wind and water already awoken and destroyed the northern lands, while earth just woke up, and fire awoke 200 years too early. So now we need to go to the volcano and sort that out so we get given a canoe
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Lore
I understood that some things happened 400 years ago, some 200 years ago, some recently, but it didn’t strike me as very important to remember which one was which. Interesting, if it’s going to be important after all.
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Some fun addendums for this week's content
So I was talking to a friend about Final Fantasy since they’d played it (in English) and I was talking about where we’d reached so far. And they were surprised when I referred to the big bosses as “Chaoses” - since in the English apparently they’re referred to as Fiends. I find that to be an interesting translation choice. Perhaps they just went with Fiend as it conveys the idea of evilness and that they’re big bads? Either way, it’s always interesting when something like this crops up in media that I’ve only experienced in Japanese and friends have only experienced in English
Another fun thing I found coming out of that was this page that talks about the Lich - and it mentions how its original inspiration was the Lich from D&D. And also has a note to say that it’s Lich and not rich (as in a 金持ち), which I thought was interesting. There’s also just a ton of info on this page so I wouldn’t read too much in case there are spoilers there, I was just looking to find reference to it being referred to as a Chaos
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Fiends with benefits
I think it’s because “chaos” is so overloaded in this game, and also it’s a bit weird to use chaos as a countable noun in English.
In Japanese, katakana is a wildcard that lets you do whatever you want! And if they ever need to refer to the abstract concept they can always use 混沌 or something like that to disambiguate (I don’t remember if they ever do that in this game however).
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Reply
Would have never guessed, katakana is hard and even more with R/L. Just assumed it was Richie, short for Richard or something 
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Oh yeah a Lich is a generic fantasy thing:
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Shit, I take the word “Lich” so for granted that I hadn’t even considered anyone would be confused. That Vecna guy they always talk about in Stranger Things? D&D Lich. Toughest bosses in every high level D&D game e.g. Baldur’s Gate 2? Lich. Definitely not "dude you kill in one round as the first major boss of a game. It’s the pronunciation that gets me. I started with Lick, then a friend convinced me it was Leech, then I figured out he was actually “Litch”.
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Chaos
Have to agree with Simias, we don’t use the word chaos that way. I think its just as likely that カオス here is not the japanese definition of カオス, but instead just a proper noun that specifically refers to these four guys and nothing else (but which nonetheless borrows some of the implications of the actual vocabulary word). Think of the word Titan, which can refer to someone literally huge, or someone figuratively huge, or the actual mythological Titans (just a proper noun here, basically), or a person or group named Titans as a proper noun with the intention of drawing comparison to the Greek Titans or the word “titan”.
Calling them Chaos’s would sound a bit… Engrish-y. Its important to remember that just because something uses a borrowed English word doesn’t mean that borrowed word means exactly the same thing that it did in English.
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As expected, Lukan has the biggest lore insights here, but it isn’t super obvious. Look into the word 輪廻. I checked the original script to see how they dealt with the translation, and this particular word was added in a later translation.
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I mean I get that but on the other hand if it’s a proper noun then it’s a proper noun. The capital letter signals that you are not dealing with the word as is but are instead dealing with a distinct but possibly related concept. For example (given that I’m currently reading them) in the First Law books by Joe Abercrombie there are a group called the Eaters. We know that we are not referring to the word “eater” and instead some sort of proper noun by the fact it is capitalised
And for this game’s translation I don’t see a particularly compelling reason that “Fiend” was picked over just preserving “Chaos” as a proper noun as part of an epithet for them. I get that Fiend is a more common word, but it comes loaded with its own set of baggage that may detract from specific connotations that the word “chaos” (in Japanese and in English) would conjure
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