sücco's burgeoning blog!

Hi fools. I hope the April Fool was pleasantly fooling to your senses. The game (tentatively titled Jeri 2) is getting “there”. I’m at the level design stage, doing last minute tweaks to certain mechanics as they come up.

I’ll probably do a devlog in the next couple days because there’s some interesting stuff to talk about. I’m not too sure when it’ll be finished. The plan is to get all levels done, let some peeps test the game to see where I went a little too far in some places, then add the last few layers of polish (I have to save it for last due to interesting circumstances… more about it another time).

If you’d be up for filming yourself playing through my hard ass game and giving me feedback. Comment below!! You could also use the “Send a Message” thing at the bottom of the sidebar if you want to privately send me your contact info.

[I started writing this post like a week and a half ago with the goal of talking about multiple games, but it was just too much to cram in one post. Lesson learned… more posts are to come babes!]

GAMING HABITUALS

I’ve been using retroachievements.org to motivate some plays and replays of old-ass videos games. Here’s my profile if yer interested! Flutters eyelashes a bunch.

As I mentioned in the last post, I finally finished Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. It was cool! And I have lots to say! I’ve been working through the other games too and I’ll say things about them sometime too.

I kept forgetting to take screenshots and videoclips most of the time, so I will be using artistic ability to illustrate my points…

NOTE! This week’s post is brought to you by Popeye’s fucking chickken.

Final Fantasy!!!!!!!!!!!

Rating: 4 Pickle Glaze Chicken Sandwich Combos out of 5

This is basically the game (epic)

I tried playing this game some years ago, but I was an impatient little twit. I ended up messing up a save state and losing some progress, so I quit like a nit. The “Pixel Remasters” of Final Fantasy 1-6 had just come out on consoles, so I bought them; it was a perfect fit!

The remastered version was fine, but it didn’t stick with me very well. I beat it and all but wasn’t crazy about it. It has a nice auto-battle feature that reselects your last choices and speeds things up a bit, which is nice (especially with how this game requires some mindless grinding action). But I played it to beat it and it was a “FINALLY IT’S OVER” kinda thing. IDK what my ish was…

Finally getting around to the original version ended up being a lot of fun. I like having RetroAchievements around, not only for the extra challenges the achievements can bring, but also just to track what retro games I’ve played and beaten. Especially when it comes to playing something time consuming like an 8-bit RPG, it’s nice to have something to cement my experience beyond my hazy months old memory.

But anyway, I really like this game’s party-building despite its simplicity. There’s six classes to choose from, and you have four party slots. You pick your classes at the start of the game and your stuck with those four dudes. You can upgrade your dudes near the middle which can change their function a bit. Here’s my ranquing!

#6 – Black Mage / Black Wizard

This guy is a total square. The black magic in Final Fantasy consists of fireballs and lightning strikes and blizzards to hurt enemies, as well as spells that buff your other fighters.

Unfortunately, this game was programmed by a confused American programmer who didn’t exactly understand what the Japanese designers intended, despite his skills. There’s a stat called intelligence that’s supposed to scale up the power of magic, but it instead does nothing!

So the fireballs and stuff will do the same damage to enemies whether you’re level 1 or level 50. You buy spells from shops in this game, and the later spells Are more powerful (AND VERY EXPENSIVE), but they’re still not even close to the damage your melee fighters can do (physical attacks do actually scale with your stats…)

Also the black mage has shitty defense, so you’re constantly babysitting his HP while he’s only really good for casting a buff spell on a melee fighter and maybe a couple uses of a level 8 damaging spell. Felt like a wasted slot.

The Black Mage earns a Bold BBQ Sauce!

#5 – Red Mage / Red Wizard

The red mage can use good melee weapons, as well as black AND white magic (white magic is healing stuff mostly). But they can’t use all good weapons or black spells or white spells. Nor is their stat growth that crazy. They’re a jack of all trades, which has good utility early game, but near the end they’re barely putting a dent in any enemies. By the end of the game I wished I picked someone else.

The Red Mage earns a Surf & Turf!

The next four would be my ideal team!

#4 White Mage / White Wizard

The white mage uses white magic, which is healing spells and a couple defense buff thingies. They wield hammers too which actually can do some passable melee damage. And one of their last spells is a pretty powerful damaging spell.

Overall, I enjoyed having a white mage around in my second playthrough. White magic is just very useful. The biggest flaw is that sometimes I had nothing for them to do, no reason to waste a spell cast or bother attacking for 1 damage. And that just feels unsatisfying in a game like this. I think that’s why they made the damage buffing spells into white magic in later games.

The White Mage earns a Chocolate Chip Biscuits!

#3 Fighter / Knight

This guy is a basic powerful guy. He can use all the good armor and weapons, and has good defense and strength. He’s the “Mario” of the bunch. Generally reliable but not that interesting. The strength of his exclusive equipment is what carries him.

When he’s upgraded to a Knight he can learn some early levels of white magic, which isn’t crazy helpful. But hey, no reason to not have this guy in the front tanking hits and doing good damage.

The Fighter earns a Mashed Potatoes with Cajun Gravy!

#2 Thief / Ninja

This guy sucks ass. The Thief is like a fighter but with terrible stats and less equipment access. There’s no gimmicky stealing stuff in this game either. The Thief is supposed to be guaranteed to run from battles, but that’s questionably programmed.

The upgrade to Ninja makes him pretty cool though!! He’s like the dark and twisted version of the Knight… that is, he learns level 1-4 black magic instead of white magic. But hey, that includes FAST, which is the awesome damage buffing spell. Ninja also gets some better stats and great equipment, including the Masamune which only he can wield.

Also it’s a NINJA!!! EPIC!!!!

The Thief earns a Flounder Fish Sandwich!

#1 Black Belt / Master

Melee combat is the meta of this game, and the black belt only knows melee combat.

As he levels up, he gets giant stat buffs for not having any weapons / armor equipped. So he’s okay for the first chunk of the game, and then starts carrying your whole team. Even through to the final boss my black belt was the one doing 500 damage per turn (only helped by the FAST spell being cast on him!)

You have limited inventory too, and since this guy doesn’t use equipment he’s like a little fanny pack for your extra loot that you can sell later. There’s a lot to love about this fella.

The Black Belt earns two Frozen Pickle Lemonades! [Limted Time Only]

I did two playthroughs for the sake of some achievements. It was really fun to try out all the classes between them. So fun I had to blab about it! I definitely wanna make a game with this kinda pick-classes-at-the-start thing because it’s really fun, and it made me want to replay the game, which I never thought would happen.

It’s easy to be ageist with games and roll your eyes and assume that an old game will be #agedLikeMilk, but even some of the first of a genre can be beautiful! There was some tedium afoot in this one, of course, but I was very charmed by its creators’ artistic voices.

Oh yeah, and the music was pretty damn good! Nobuo Uematsu is a wonderfully talented man, and his F.F. soundtracks are amazing. This one is pretty simple, but it has a lot of wonderful melodies that get stuck in your brain. And the battle theme does not get annoying, unlike a certain other NES RPG that starts with D and ends with ragon Warrior!

Thanks for reading fellows!

🐒See you next post!🐒