LogFAQs > #947245109

Four crystals, four elements, it's all sounding rather familiar at the start. The wind is fading and soon the other elements will as well, it's a decent setup. We get brief intros to our main players- a princess, an old man, a pirate, and finally our chocobo-friend protagonist. A meteorite falls, we find Lenna and Galuf knocked out by it (pretty lucky really...) and after some encouragement from Boko, Bartz decides that leaving a concussed young woman with an amnesiac flirty old man might not be the best idea. You could hold down A the entire first hour and not have a single problem with the battles so I'm not gonna bother mentioning the early ones. I like that Bartz is already distinguished as different from the noble heroic good guy Cecil archetype, just a commoner traveling around the world with his chocopal who was at the right place at the right time.

We fail to steal a pirate ship but Faris helps us out anyway thanks to recognising Lenna's pendant as identical to their own. I decline the auto-pilot and wander around the world map but there seems to be only one place to enter, a town called Tule. Galuf and Bartz perv on Faris accidentally, the town citizens talk about a monster sealed in the canal and I learn some very detailed gameplay basics nearby. At the Wind Shrine we heroically tap A through our first boss and then we get a proper intro to our hero's tale- the wind crystal is shattered into six pieces, each crystal sends its 'essence' to one of our four crewmates, and King Tycoon delivers some exposition before disappearing in a pretty odd way.

Putting them here to remind myself if needed later: Courage-Flame-Faris, Devotion-Water-Lenna, Hope-Earth-Galuf, Passion-Wind-Bartz. If these really are the only party members this must be the fastest the crew has been gathered together in any FF (or most RPGs!). The crystal pieces give us some fresh Jobs and the game can now finally start.

...Well, almost. It's still super easy for a bit, but it gives time to learn the ropes. I hit 'yes' on the tutorial again because I thought it was phrased differently and might give me new info, but nope, same unskippable 5 minutes as before. Lenna meets her family friend Zok who eventually gives Bartz the key to the canal (nice bit of characterisation having him hold onto it for a bit). Bartz remembers his parents talking about the crystals- they clearly still weigh heavily on his mind but of course this connects him to the plot in a bigger way. I drop back in to bring Boko along before going but he's been injured and is being looked after by the pirates. I'm sure we'll see him later, it's nice that they put this little detail in for players who would go back to check.

Karlabos doesn't put up much of a fight even though Fire is the only Black Mage spell I bought (>_>), but Faris's trusty steed Syldra, poor thing, gets dragged underwater. We drift along to a cool looking ship graveyard and hop along the shipwrecks (this is much better than 7's train graveyard in every way), murdering an army of shorts+bandana wearing skeletons on the way. After walking underwater (hey it's 2D you can get away with that) we get the least surprising reveal of all time with Faris's gender, hey at least they didn't drag it out for half the game. Galuf remains lecherous as ever but redeems himself soon after by resisting the impulses of the Siren, purely by virtue of not remembering who he is being shown (lol). Also worth noting that Faris gets taken in by the same illusion as Lenna, and with the pendant and her weird behaviour in the Wind Shrine it seems like she has a connection to the Tycoons.

The Siren is the first boss who has anything interesting going on with casting Silence and becoming undead, but isn't remotely a threat. Everybody thanks Galuf and we're back on the world map and soon in the lively Irish sounding town of Carwen. Bartz levels up his piano skills (lol) and the harbour is of course empty, so we head up the North Mountain avoiding the poison flowers until Lenna is shot by an arrow. Faris pulls off some impressive acrobatics to get us together again and we're soon into another boss. The gimmick here is Magissa's husband showing up but again we walk through it.

Lenna gets herself poisoned again (is she building up an immunity?) to heal her flying Wind Drake friend, and we now have our third method of world map transport within a couple hours. I leave it here. Enjoying things so far, the gameplay is still super easy but that's to be expected. I haven't spoken much about the job system but I'm still trying things out, swapping everybody around and seeing how the different classes are. I recently switched Bartz to Monk and the double hit plus counterattack is wiping everything. Q- are certain characters more suited to certain classes or can you just whack anything on anyone?

The dialogue is quirky and fun, the characters are pretty broadly laid out but they're already making sure to give everybody a bit of backstory and something to do. If the cast really is this small there's a lot of advantages to that, presumably nobody is gonna fade from the story or be useless and the inter-party banter could become great, we've already gotten hints of that. There's been some good music so far too. It's always awkward starting the intro to these playthroughs but we've got that down now so I'm looking forward to getting back to it!

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