Final Fantasy 1 Beginner Club W11
| Week 11 | 2025-11-07T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | š Final Fantasy 1 - Week 10 |
| Next week | TBD |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF1BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
Once you have two new key items: the cube and the chime.
more details
With the Kraken vanquished and 3 crystals restored, weāre now entering the endgame. This week weāll mostly do fetch-quests to prepare for the last stretch of dungeon crawling.
First while weāre near Onrac we can investigate the thing that Kop (one of the NPCs in the village) claims to have seen fall near the waterfall. Take your trusty canoe and explore the nearby river. Youāll eventually encounter a waterfall and, like in any decent RPG, thereās treasure hiding behind it!
Next step, we have to investigate Lufein, the town south of Gaia (the āfalconās wingā). If you go there immediately however youāll notice that you canāt communicate with the locals. You should already have the solution in your inventory however: in the Sunken Shrine last week you should have found the Rosetta Stone, that you can now bring to Une in Melmond to decipher their language. If you missed it, youāll have to go for another diveā¦
With your N5 in Lufeinian under your belt, you can now visit the town of Lufein and receive a whole lot of lore and also a key item that will let us continue our adventures next week.
If you have black or white wizards, note that there are two somewhat hidden magic shops in Lufein that sell the strongest black and white spells in the game. If you have a red wizard, well, uh, thank you for coming, I guess.
Map
Miscellaneous
A familiar name, retconned
In some version of FF1 (including the Pixel Remaster), an NPC in Lufein mentions that our beloved airship was built by one of their people named āCidā. This isnāt mentioned in the original version of the game.
Those familiar with later entries in the series probably understand the relevance of this name. Hereās what the fan wiki has to say about Cid:
Cid (ć·ć) is a character who has appeared or been mentioned in almost all Final Fantasy-related media; the main series, spinoffs, film, and anime. [ā¦] However, each installment features a different Cid character and his roles in the series range widely from a party member to an NPC to an antagonist.
In Final Fantasy tradition, Cid characters often have a group of distinct traits fans have come to expect. They are often mechanically minded and frequently portrayed as engineers or inventors. Cids are often the source of the airships that the player uses toward the gameās end as its captain or its creator.
Since Final Fantasy 1 predates this tradition, the devs decided to retconn a mention of Cid in the updated scripts of the various remakes, making him the builder of the airship.
We will encounter the first ārealā Cid in Final Fantasy 2.
A critical bug
You may have noticed that, by this point in the game, you should start landing critical hits fairly regularly, while they were rather rare at the beginning of the game. This is mainly due to the critical hit bug that changes the way the odds of a critical hit are calculated.
Originally the idea was that every weapon would have a ācriticalā stat that would dictate how likely you are to get a critical hit when attacking with it. The crit rate would depend mostly on the weapon type, for instance blunt weapons would have a lower crit rate than swords. Originally the devs meant meant for the Nunchaku to have a crit rate of 10, the Mithril Sword 5, the Mithril Axe 4, the Hammer 1.
But instead the code was bugged and the value used was the index of the weapon in the table containing all weapons in the game. So instead the Nunchaku got a crit rate of 1 (itās the first weapon in the list), the Mithril Sword got 17, the Mithril Axe 19 and the Hammer 5.
Since the order of the weapons in the list matches roughly the order in which they become available in the game (early-game weapons are at the start of the list, end-game weapons at the end), the effective result is that you get very few crits early game even with weapons like the Nunchaku which were meant to have a relatively high rate, meanwhile the late-game weapons land critical hits at a much higher rate than intended.
This also renders some weapon a lot worse that they were meant to be. For instance the Sharp Sword that we will find next week has a relatively mediocre attack rating (lower than the Flame Sword we found in the volcano) but it was supposed to have the highest crit rate in the game at 30 to compensate. Because of this bug, its actual crit rate is even higher (34) but now a bunch of other weapons have similar or even higher crit rates and much better attack ratings.
While this was originally a bug, every port and remake of the game has kept those values instead of reverting to the intended rates. I suppose that it would change the experience too much if they fixed it now, in particular physical attacks toward the end of the game would become a lot less powerful on average due to the extremely reduced crit rate with most late-game weapons. For instance the best weapon in the game was supposed to have a crit rate of 10 but due to this bug it has a crit rate of 40 on top of its massive 56 attack rating!
Participation
- Iām playing along
- I will catch up later
- Iām still playing but I havenāt reached this section yet
- Iām a filthy preplayer but Iām here for the discussion
oh dear. I got my wires crossed and it looks like Iāve inadvertently become a filthy preplayer. I completely missed the bit about the 
