Ah yes, the patches. - Oh I want to play, it’s been a while. - Sure, wait for the 2 hours update then.
I agree with you that it was better before #old
I’ll still take the ability to have the patches over not, broadly speaking. At least excluding the times when they randomly decide to ruin games, like Killer7 getting an update a little while back with AI upscaled images that just looked like a blurry nightmare. I think they walked that back maybe? I dunno. But some games do release in really shameful states recently.
Generally my stuff seems to stay updated quickly enough recently, but I do remember closer to the PS3 era or so having a lot of issues with that console wanting to perpetually update more than doing anything.
The PS1/PS2 era games were peak software design. Complex games and no patching possible.
I can only agree as I am not at all biased by FFX being my first FF that I played on the PS2.
To be fair though let’s have a look at the list of bugs, I can’t remember any but there are some apparently (not that many though!): Category:Bugs in Final Fantasy X | Final Fantasy Wiki | Fandom
And still in that period where they could be made pretty quickly. I especially love that time, yeah, felt like there was so much creativity in the different styles being played with, so games felt much more distinct from each other for the most part. There’s a lot of homogenization of design elements now.
This week, the notorious 三日月 rears its head again… and it is the elf prophet bringing it up. Last time, it wasn’t a prophet saying it, but the guy who said it WAS recounting the words of a prophet. So, now it seems more reasonable. The prophet sees images of a crescent moon in his visions - literally. He (and in turn, we) has to interpret them, and it means the crescent lake. I thought it was just the game being obtuse or poetic, but as part of a prophetic vision a literal Crescent Moon makes a LOT more sense.
Week 8 content
Did only the volcano for now, that was a fun dungeon. Really happy about finding that ice sword in the treasure chest, made every other random chest ambush much easier.
(Also I had a small “oh crap” moment seeing the first dragon enemy in that one chest)
Also is it just me, or are the enemies in the river much stronger than anything around it? My very first group was three piranha and a white gator and they absolutely demolished my monk. Seeing even your warrior get hit by 100+ by a random enemy is scary 
Meanwhile I found common goblins right outside the volcano
I think the encounters here are a bit weird because you have the Pravoca region in the North and the Elf lands to the west which are both relatively low level areas that spill over in the river section.
Meanwhile you can never trigger the river encounters without a canoe, so the devs could set the difficulty higher without worry.
Week 8 Play Report
So first off the party headed over to the volcano and delved down to the lowest levels. Not too much of note here, I noticed that it seemed like encounters only triggered on ‘safe’ ground - so when I wasn’t feeling up to fighting I found it actually sometimes made more sense to just walk through the lava since the rate of health reduction wasn’t that high overall. By the time the party had reached the bottom they were pretty low on spells and potions but luckily found the boss in the second room they checked, so teleported back up to the surface, went back to town, and restocked on items before returning to mop up the last few chests. On this stockup run, since the wallets were pretty full they bought 99 of both types of potions and a lot of ethers. These didn’t cost all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Next it was off to the ice caverns, and I have to say I quite enjoyed the little trolls that the designers put in. I think it’s fun that the dungeon gives you a little narrative by having you climb back up to the top level. And then I did fall for the staircase on level 1 but going back through the dungeon wasn’t a huge deal at that point. The boss was hilarious given it only took one shot from my warrior to kill it. And now I’ve gone and retrieved the airship so the party can now ditch the boat and get between towns more easily
Week 8
Thanks for the vocab sheet again, finally understood why I almost got stuck.
Apparently I completely missed the dialog with the エルフの予言者 so I didn’t know where to go once I got the 『浮遊石』. (Didn’t actually end up stuck as I just happened to take a casual stroll on that exact area for no reason at all, lucky I guess)
In the original Famicom version you have to manually select the item in the inventory to trigger the sequence, so you better know what you have to do… Which in my case involved looking up a guide.
This weeks stab log
Both the Volcano and Ice Cavern didn’t stand a chance against 4 juiced up swordsmen. I ran into one complication in the Ice Cavern when my entire team was, I assume, DEATHED by the weird imp things. Good thing this is a video game. I didn’t do anything beyond that, those dungeons are annoying enough by themselves, let alone back to back.
We’re going to have more dialogue next week, and even more the week after that (not even sure I’ll be able to squeeze a dungeon in week 10, although I’m trying…)
Ouch, I might have been stuck forever had I read that version. According to my notes I did go back to talk to the elves so I must not have read carefully enough. That’s a good lesson though, and loving to be playing a video game in Japanese so far. Like, if I read a book, I can keep turning the pages, even if I zone out for some of it, at some point I’ll be done with the book anyway. But with this game, I have to stay on my toes and focus on what people say if I don’t want to be stuck!
I can’t seem to find it now, but when glancing at this game on backloggd a while back, I saw someone refer to this game in a review as something like being “about how annoying they could make it to walk through a room” and while I’m not feeling that myself I found it a pretty funny description.
@JupiterJesus are you the only one translating everything on the doc or are others helping? It’s a lot of work!
Thank you for your labour at any rate.
I went into the excel to look at how much of Week 9 was required dialogue (that’s all I read right now due to lack of freetime) and all I’ll say is lol.
If you’re referencing the header, I’ve set it up a while ago. Congrats for not being a filthy preplayer, unlike some people.
Yeah. I consider it part of my morning JP practice while the kids are at school, just a few sentences a day.