When we last saw Benjamin, we were about to leave the Level Forest, alone, with only an axe to remember that whom we have lost...
We have now left the Level Forest, alone, with only an axe to remember that whom have lost. Foresta and the Level Forest have nothing left for us, so we'll head upwards. Into the unknown!
As you have probably gathered, there are no random encounters at all within this game. Enemies within areas can be seen and avoided. "But what about the World Map?" I don't hear you ask but am going to answer anyway, "There aren't any enemies on it! Surely there must be random encounters!"
Nope, instead we have Battlefields. Battlefields are totally optional, and can be moved straight past, but completing all ten battles within each battlefield gives you a reward. For now, we'll leave this battlefield and head upwards into the sand.
Ah, here we are. The key item is bound to be inside such a minor location on the map!
Wow! No enemies! Getting a vital item has never been this easy before! We'll just head up through this cave and...
...here's the chest! Man this was so easy Kaeli could have done it herself even if she was as sick as she claims to be...
OH MAN I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING.
What you see is Benjamin reacting to is a sudden change from deep and reflective background music to upbeat jazz as a new character walks in.
Benjamin: First of all, my name's Benjamin, and I'm looking for Elixir.
????: I'll sell you some for, say, 9000GP.
At this point, Benjamin becomes so shocked he gains the ability to phase through solid objects.
Benjamin: Whoa! That's way to much!
????: Listen kid, this stuff is precious, right?
Benjamin: My allowance is only 2GP a month!
????: Then let's do it this way. I'm going to the Bone Dungeon to find treasure. You come with me and help. If I get the treasure, you get the Elixir.
Benjamin: Do I have any choice? When do we go?
"Well, Benjamin, you could always not care about the girl you just met..."
"Hey shut up man, you're nothing but a thinly veiled metaphor for the pharmaceutical industry!"
Benjamin turns to leave.
Tristam: Why don't you whack a few monsters there, and maybe win something, kid!
Benjamin: The name's Benjamin!
Oh, apparently we found out his name without him actually telling us. Tristam must be wearing a name tag or something. He probably stole it from some orphans because he just seems like that kind of guy.
So now we leave the curiously heart-shaped room, exit the temple and return to the World map. We'll head back down into the battlefield.
This one consists of Mad Plant/Mad Plant/Mad Plant and Mad Plant/Poison Toad. Mad Plants are weak against axe attacks. Well of course they are. They're trees. We've chopped down, like, a traspillion of them, and I have little to no doubt that Kaeli chopped down, like, a godrillion PER DAY. Predictably, they go down in one hit from an axe.
Tristam's weapon of choice is the Ninja Star. He only carries 99 of them, but, and regardless of what the battle animations tell you, he only uses one at a time. They basically last forever. They also inflict poison. The Poison Toad is, understandably, NOT poisonable.
So after some long hard battles, we finally kill the last batch of enemies.
The tedium and repetition of the battles was annoying, but forgiveable. The thing that really annoyed me (and still does to this day) about Battlefields was the fact that SOMETIMES THE PRIZES WERE SHIT. On rare occasions, you'd end up with items that were useful, but the majority of the time, you'd end up with a tiny amount of EXP or GP. When I say "tiny", I mean that the prizes were often smaller than the rewards for the individual battles. And that reaaaaaaally sucked.
After this Battlefield, we return to the Sand Temple, then go to the second Battlefield to the left.
This Battlefield consists of Poison Toad/Poison Toad/Mad Plant and Poison Toad/Poison Toad/Basilisk. Basilisks are generic enemies with no real resistances or weaknesses.
And for our efforts at this Battlefield, we get the Charm! The Charm is a piece of armor which increases defense by 1. That's all it does. It's somewhat less infuriating than the EXP/GP bullshit but it's still pretty bad.
But, now that we've cleared out all the Battlefields (and levelled up Benjamin from 3 to 5), it's time to head to the Bone Dungeon.
"Dude what the hell makes you think that there's treasure inside a giant decapitated skull?"
"The glowing eyes?"
"What glowing OH MY GOD FUCK THIS I'M GONE"
...or so any sane man would say.
What Benjamin and crew do is go inside.
Inside the Bone Dungeon, we are greeted with enemies leading up each side, and some shifting sand in front of us. Obviously, it's difficult to see shifting sand on static screen shots.
Everything inside the border is shifting sand, and the arrow shows the direction it's moving. You can move against the sand, but you can't make any progress "upstream".
We're dragged up to a pair of enemies surrounding a treasure box with some Cure Potions inside. Thing is, you can just jump over the treasure box so you don't actually need to fight either of them. Here's a tip for game designers: Don't block passage with things you can get around very easily. It just makes you look like you don't know what you are doing. The sand, on the other hand, does a far better job of forcing conflict. Because you can't go back the way you came, you have to fight one of the groups of enemies down the left and right sides of the room. You can do them now, since enemies only respawn upon leaving the dungeon, or you can do them on the way out.
We'll leave them for now, and head up through the mouth of... something. Seriously, I have no idea what it could be. It has the skull of a ram or demon or something, yet a long, thin body... Maybe it's a Ramaconda?
Maybe not though.
We jump over the stepping stones in order to cross the water...
...then down some stairs to the right and into the water. It's probably not actually water. Firstly, we're in a desert, and secondly, water is not GREEN. It looks sort of weird, but it does give a sort of decayed "hey remember you're meant to be in something's skull" feel.
Through the ribs, out the other side, up some stairs, and we come across a blocked up door.
Benjamin goes ??
Tristam: Watch this!
He then proceeds to blow up the wall. Tristam is not a man of subtlety.
Tristam: Aren't these something? I'll sell you some, cheap! How about 50 Explosives for 30GP?
We, the players, are actually given a choice in the matter. We can reply "Okay!" or "Sorry." I decided that we didn't want the bombs.
I still do not want any of your lovely explosives. Some Ninja Stars would be nice though...
FINE OK. I know RPGs will occasionally repeat a question over and over until you give the correct answer, but I haven't seen a game which does it with a question as aggressive as "Will you buy my bombs?"
"Would you like to trigger a nuclear winter? Y/WHY NOT?"
Unlike every other weapon type in the game, explosives do not increase in power as you level up. They start off as strong as they're ever going to be.
So now that we have the bombs, we can go back to the previous room and blow some stuff up! Just to the north of the stepping stones, there was a small clump of bones.
We couldn't move it because it's so heavy. Basically what happened was someone put a T-Rex skeleton into a trash compactor, then put the resulting, and perfectly rectangular, set of bones in front of a corridor of the exact same width.
...
WELL THAT'S THE ONLY EXPLANATION I CAN THINK OF
Anyway on the other side of the compactosaurus was a chest.
The Steel Shield has a defense of 5 and so, unlike the Charm, it's actually useful. Wait hang on, I've just compared a huge metal plate to a necklace. Whatever. Back in the other room, we walk through the door that Tristam kindly detonated for us...
...and through a tunnel which leads to an identical door. Not sure why the tunnel's there. Somewhat superfluous really.
We end up in a room full of new enemies. We have the bird, called Roc, to my right, the skeleton, called Skeleton, to the bottom right and the worm, called Sand Worm, to my left.
The Roc is weak against shoot attacks (i.e. the Ninja Star). So is The Rock. The Skeleton is, in true RPG style, vulnerable to healing magic and items. This is phrased as "weak against zombie attacks", and it puts a new perspective on the Life spell if you think about it as a "zombie attack". Oh sure, you can bring your buddy back to help in your struggle against Garland/Golbez/Kefka/Sephiroth/Ultimecia/Kuja/Sin/Vayne, but they'll be subject to an eternity of untold suffering and endless pain. If you go through every Final Fantasy game and substitute "Phoenix Down" for "Vial of T-Virus", you'll find that the plot still fits together fine. Square has been setting this up for a long time people. If you view FFMQ from the right angle, it throws the rest of the FF games into a brand new perspective. FFMQ is the key which holds the Final Fantasy franchise plotline together but anyway where was I? There's some stairs to the left that we can go down.
To the right of the stairs, there is an enemy.
Wait a minute that looks kind of familiar...
Aww. We're not even out of the first main dungeon of the game and we're already seeing re-skins of existing enemies. This one's not even that different, it's just a darker shade of green. I don't even really see the need for it. There's three brand new enemy types introduced in this dungeon alone, and they probably could have gotten away with just using re-using Behemoth with some stat upgrades. Re-skinning was inevitable, but I'm disappointed they've resorted to it so soon.
Oh, and I forgot to get the third state of the Behemoth, so here's the Gorgon's.
Oh yeah, like that's not going to scare tiny children. It's frickin' demonic! The eyes have gone from red to HOLY SHIT RED, and the mouth has gone from black to HOLY SHIT RED. The Gorgon's rage is so powerful that their eyes can light up their mouth. How is that not terrifying?
Anyway, once we kill it and NEVER SLEEP AGAIN, we head north and past a Skeleton.
If it looks weak, bomb it! Say what you will about US foreign policy, it works!
The skeleton collapses! To the right is a room with some stepping stones to Ninja Stars.
To the right are some enemies guarding MORE Ninja Stars. See what I meant about never, ever running out? We'll head up north.
More sliding sand here!
So we're forced to go through the enemies.
More bombing to do. Wait, what's that to the right..?
AW HELL NO
...
They've re-skinned the fucking boss of the Level Forest and put him in the very next dungeon as a standard enemy. AND THEY SPELT "MINOTAUR" WRONG AS WELL. Why did they feel the need to reuse old enemies so early? And it's not like there aren't any new enemies! I know there are, I've SEEN them! So yeah, being a "Zombie Minotar", he is of course vulnerable to Cure and the like.
So yeah, we fill him full of health, then we move on.
Past the sliding sand and down the stairs.
Past the skeletons and up to the mouth of the Ramaconda.
BOOM!
We run up the skeleton and into the cave.
Seeds! Seeds are the third of the four usable items in the game, and they recover your magic. Back out we go, and out the side of the Ramaconda.
The sand forces us to fight the Skeletons and Minotar Zombie. Rather bizarrely, the actual sand appears to be sliding from right to left despite going in the opposite direction. I imagine this would have confused a few people looking for a shortcut.
So we destroy them (all with Cure), bomb the Ramaconda, and run through it.
Another cavern at the tail end of the Ramaconda...
...and we get our first Black Magic spell.
Back outside, we kill the Minotar Zombie, bomb the next Ramaconda, and go through it into the next room.
OH GOD. As you can probably tell, this would be the boss of the Bone Dungeon. Appropriately enough, he is a giant skeleton. I'm not entirely sure how a red skeleton would even be formed, but it has been, and we're going to have to live with that. Except we aren't, because he kill him.
Monster: I have the power of the Crystal of Earth!
Whoa, whoa. Hold up a minute. You're trying to tell me that the place Tristam was looking for treasure just happened to be the same place where the guy who had the Crystal of Earth was hiding? I CALL BULLSHIT ON THAT GOOD SIRS.
This is the first real boss fight of the game. The Minotaur was technically a boss, but it wasn't really on the same difficulty level as most of the bosses are. I say "technically a boss" because the battle was accompanied by the Boss theme music, one of the shining stars in a superb soundtrack. I'll point out more examples of what I think are terrific pieces of music as I encounter them.
But anyway, Flamerus Rex can be a nasty boss. It's Bone Missile attack fires one of its ribs at one character, and Chew Off does a significant deal of damage to a single character. Twin Fangs will hit a character twice, for moderate damage. I'm not sure what effect the "being hit twice" has on proceedings, but I don't think it's very much. Rip Earth, on the other hand, will do moderate damage to both characters and can be devastating. He can also inflict poison on someone with Poison Flour, which can cause trouble. We need to Cure at the right times, or else we'll die pretty quickly. Also: Tristam has Life, but Benjamin does not. Benjamin dieing can be recovered from, but Tristam's death cannot.
After a few rounds of Quake from Benjamin, Flamerus Rex loses some of his ribs.
After a few more, he loses the rest.
Interestingly, now that he's lost all his ribs, he won't use Bone Missile anymore. I realise that this is a fairly minor touch, but it's a nice touch that makes me think that someone up there cared! After a few more hits, he goes down.
I said "go down", not "die". Apparently he can still attack whilst lieing in a heap on the floor. He's the first thing we've encountered which changes three times, so I suppose he's allowed to play with expectations. A few hits later, he dies.
Somehow, he's standing up again. He's also EXPLODING. Maybe he's red because he's made from STICKS OF DYNAMITE? Once he's gone (again), Tristam immediately runs off to grab the chests.
He's interrupted by the Crystal of Earth appearing and floating down the the ground veeeeeery slowly.
Benjamin: Look! The Crystal!
Tristam: Nevermind that, get a load of this stuff!
I'll admit it. Tristam's a bit of a dick, but he has excellent taste in awesome frickin toys.
PLACEBO GET!
PLOT COUPON GET!
Sure, I helped you get the treasure, you gave me the Elixir. A deal's a deal. Pleasure doing business with you. See you around!
WHAT? HOW IS THAT CONFUSING? SHUT UP.
So now we just have to get out again. Backtracking's easy, because we've already cleared a path from here all the way back to the first room.
It's just a case of picking a side (let's go for right) and tearing your way from there to the front door.
AND WE'RE OUT! FREEEEEDOM.
As you can see, freeing the Crystal has fixed everything. All the trees don't look dead anymore, and everyone's the age they're meant to be again. Hooray! Let's get Kaeli that water Elixir, shall we?
"OH I SEE YOUR STUTTER HAS CLEARED UP NICELY IMAGINE THAT"
Benjamin: Here's the Elixir.
Kaeli: Thank you. Now I can visit Spencer in Aquaria...
Benjamin: Why don't I go to Aquaria first and look around? Where is it?
Kaeli: It's through the Focus Tower, and to the northeast.
"Okay, you stay here and 'get better'."
After setting off towards the Focus Tower, we make a stop off at a Battlefield. Today we have Minotar Zombie, Basilisk/Minotar Zombie and Land Worm/Land Worm. All enemies we've encountered before. Nothing unexpected. Our prize: 150GP.
AND NOW: THE FOCUS TOWER.