Final Fantasy 1 Beginner Club W12
| Week 12 | 2025-11-14T15:00:00Z |
|---|---|
| Previous week | š Final Fantasy 1 - Week 11 |
| Next week | š Final Fantasy 1 - Week 13 |
| Home Threads | FFBC / FF1BC |
Vocabulary sheets, transcriptions etc.:
Stopping point
This week we explore the Mirage Tower (in the middle of the desert). The stopping point is after youāre warped back to the world map.
more details
With the Cube and the Chime in our inventory, we now have all the prerequisites to explore the Mirage Tower and what lies beyond.
I donāt really have much more to say, itās just a long dungeon, you should know the drill by now.
Thereās one key item that you donāt want to miss in one of the highest floors: the adamantite. It will let us get an optional weapon. In fact if you want you can leave the dungeon immediately after getting it and collect the weapon before facing the boss, although of course youāll have to climb all the way back up.
If youāre trying to get a full bestiary (i.e. defeat all monsters in the game), the rarest and toughest entry can be encountered this week. Read the DEATH MACHINE section below for the details.
Map
Miscellaneous
DEATH MACHINE
In the Final Fantasy series, the strongest enemy in the game often isnāt the final boss. Many entries have one or more optional bosses that offer a significantly harder challenge than any mandatory encounter.
Final Fantasy I doesnāt have that, but the DEATH MACHINE comes close: itās not really an optional boss, it just appears like a normal random encounter in the last section of todayās dungeon (on the straight path leading to the boss):
This enemy has very high defenses, very high attack, a lot of HP and it regenerates health at every turn. Fun. The only enemy in the game that can boast better stats is the final boss.
The odds of triggering the fight are very low (around 1%, although it varies depending on the version) and given that it can only occur in one very small portion of the dungeon, youāre very unlikely to face the WARMECH (thatās the English name) unless you decide to grind encounters in that section. If you want a full bestiary however, you know what you have to doā¦ It took me over an hour of going back and forth on the bridge to finally get the encounter and capture the screenshot above.
Itās pretty tedious because you need to make sure to keep your HP nearly full at all times as you deal with all the other encounters because starting the DEATH MACHINE encounter with half your HP gone is generally a bad ideaā¦
The English NES version of the enemy was significantly simplified: it has a higher 3/64 encounter rate and regenerates a lot less health every turn.
You reward for being victorious is a whole lot of Gil and XP, but if youāre strong enough to beat this enemy, you probably donāt really need them anymore:
The DEATH MACHINE also appears in some SaGa games:
I have no idea whatās happening in this video but it looks intense.
Thereās an additional bit of deep Nintendo lore attached to this enemy:
Nintendo Power once held a āYour Name in a Game?ā contest in their SeptemberāOctober 1990 issue, which involved photographing the Warmech and mailing it to their head office as part of a random draw. Nintendo Power never announced a winner, but Chris Houlihan was named in a secret room in the English version of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In all later ports any mention of him is removed, though his secret room remains.
Reroutes
In order to make this club more manageable I have guided us through what is probably the most standard progression in the game, but you may have noticed that some dungeons can be done in a different order. In fact, the game is only really linear from the start until Lich, and then all eventually leads to the final dungeon that we will visit next week, but everything in between can be done in many different orders.
For instance you could defeat Lich, get the canoe, do the Ice Cave, get the airship, go to the Sunken Shrine, find the Rosetta Stone but leave Kraken alone, collect the Cube and the Chime, do this weekās content and only then backtrack to do the dragon trial, defeat Kraken and finish with the Volcano.
Of course given the difference of difficulty in the dungeons, some sequences will be easier than others, but it can make for a fun challenge if you ever decide to replay this game.
You may have noticed that the boss of this week mentions that you have defeated Lich, Marilith and Kraken. This bit of dialogue changes if you havenāt beaten those bosses yet.
You probably want to wait after youāre done with this weekās content to read this:
It's full of stars
The ęµ®éå is probably the location whose general atmosphere has been changed the most between the original version and the various remakes. I think itās interesting because the game remains pretty evasive as to where exactly this castle is located. Clearly itās somewhere āin the skyā, but how high exactly? As was discussed last week, you could interpret the Lufeinian dialogue to mean that itās all the way in space.
If you look at the Pixel Remaster however, itās pretty clear that it seems to be somewhere in the atmosphere, or at least low enough that the clouds are visible, slowly drifting underneath. The castle itself seems to be made of stone with pillars and cupolas visible all over the place. The ground is made of what seems to be uneven cobblestone:
Apart from the robots you can encounter there (both NPCs and enemies), the rest of the technology appears arcane, with strange, alien slabs visible in multiple locations, some of which you can interact with:
The music is also eerie but generally fairly nondescript:
Now hereās what it looks like in the original:
The vibe is, in my opinion, completely different. The walls seem to be metalic, the ground is an even grid, the various machines resemble computers or other electronic devices. I even wonder if these objects around them are not supposed to be desk chairs? And absolutely no sign of stone column or cupolas, itās all very streamlined and minimalistic.
When you interact with the computer-looking devices, it evens tell you that youāre logging-in:
On top of that you can see that there are no clouds in the backgrounds. It looks black in my screenshots because of the heavy downscaling, but in reality itās just a bunch of blue dots:
Are thoseā¦ stars? The éćęć®ęµ· mentioned in Lufein?
The music is also very different:
https://youtu.be/LblXQFDEj28?list=RDLblXQFDEj28
To me it sounds a lot more industrial than the PR version, you have those beep boop noises that evoke computers.
I think itās pretty clear that this flying fortress is meant to be a spacecraft in orbit, but it looks like Square decided to backtrack and stick to a fantasy setting in the various remakes.
By the way, you may have noticed that the boss area is riddled with stars of David in the original version:
You will not be surprised to learn that this was purged in the English NES release:
While Iām discussing the looks of the Famicom game, one detail that surprised me is that the 4 crystals that light up in your inventory as you progress in the game are all blue orbs instead of being color-coded:
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
(non ironic)
