From boss to boss, from grind to grind

After having gone through a grind session with metal slimes in the Bowhole, it's time to start another one up. That session was enough to help my party take down Hootingham-Gore, but Goresby-Purrvis has proven to be a different beast all together. Literally and figuratively.

The fight is against only him, but he attacks twice per turn and has a one-hit KO move that he uses regularly. The difficulty here is that for all of its difficulty Dragon Quest IX is stingy with the full-party healing spells. Maybe I need to upgrade Peridot (my priest) to a sage to gain these skills, but gaining them would no doubt require some levelling up as well. Which brings me back around to my bafflement with the game's job system.

You get six points (after passing level 30 or so) every few level ups (it seems almost arbitrary, but happens regularly enough) and most of the skills or stat boosts cost 10 or more points.

So even if, for example, I put all of Peridot's skill points towards her "Faith" attribute, it would take three level ups to get a major boost to her magical mending (so long as each level yields six points to put towards it). On average Peridot requires about 17,000 experience points to go from level to level at this point in the game.

Now, in Gittingham Palace there is a place with a restorative tile, so it's possible to grind indefinitely there. Plus, you'll get around 900-1300 experience/fight doing so.

But at that rate of experience you'd need to fight (at most) 18 battles to level Peridot up.

The average battle takes about a minute to play out, so that's around 20 minutes per level.

Assuming that the experience Peridot gains from these fights doesn't drop too drastically from level to level, I could, in theory, grind in Gittingham Palace for an hour and gain three levels (and enough skill points to actually get something out of my character's "job").

An hour of grinding isn't necessarily terrible. Especially not in a JRPG. But having to do so to reap the benefits of your character's job - one of Dragon Quest IX's major mechanics - is ridiculous.

The job system in the Final Fantasy series, with its separate "Job Points," isn't necessarily any better. But at least in that system you're building up your characters' jobs with nearly every fight and not every 20.

At any rate, skill points aren't entirely relevant to facing Goresby-Purrvis. One level more should be enough to be well-matched with the sword-wielding cheetah. And that, if my calculations hold, will just take about another half an hour (after his last level up my main character needed some 32000 experience points to do so again).

Hopefully whatever is beyond the door that Goresby-Purrvis blocks doesn't involve an even stronger boss.

A post playthrough Super Mario RPG assessment

The 90s was the golden era of 16-bit console RPGs. You had your Final Fantasy titles, your Secret of Mana, your Lufia games, and, for those unafraid of emulators, Tales of Phantasia.

But, a little late to the scene, riding on the shoulders of giants, came Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

This was the game that got me interested in the RPG genre to begin with. From there I moved onto those Final Fantasy games and Lufia titles, and the masterpiece that is Tales of Phantasia.

But I first played this game (several times through) almost twenty years ago, now. As such, you'd be right to wonder whether the game holds up or not.

After spending a weekend working through it with friends, I can write confidently that it does. For the most part.

Graphically, the sprites based on 3D-models still look clean and neat (with the exception of monsters like Belome).

Aurally, the music and sound effects have all the charm they do in the other Mario games.

Story-wise, the game is still compelling since several characters and elements of the Mario world are explored for the first and (alas) last time.

And, as far as the gameplay is concerned, Super Mario RPG offers a fine blend of JRPG standards (turn based combat and side-questing for secret areas and items) and Mario-inspired mini-games and platforming.

Though, the game's platforming is much more difficult than I remember. Mostly because the game's isometric viewpoint doesn't lend itself to easily judging distances and depths. Were it possible, warming up with some Sonic 3D Blast probably would've helped.

But Super Mario RPG really shines in its minigames' integration with the main game. Most of these games are played through at least once because of some relevance to the story. Placing them within the structure of the game as a whole keeps you from needing to do any serious backtracking to retry them. The minigames' accessibility also makes the game's world feel much tighter than those that are spread out over expansive world maps.

The cost for that tight world design is high, though. There's little exploration involved in Super Mario RPG. Just as when I played the game as a kid, in this recent playthrough there were a few instances where the crook of a wall or the texture of a rock suggested that something lay just beyond it, if only you had some of Link's bombs or Samus' roll ability.

However, beating an RPG crafted by the masters of the console RPG golden era, SquareSoft (known now as Square Enix) in a weekend (approximately 20 hours) is otherwise unthinkable. Were there an expansive overworld in Super Mario RPG, rather than a node system, much more time would be spent in travel. Not to mention, time spent fighting monsters during that travel.

But that's Super Mario RPG's greatest strength.

Even though when you know what you're doing it's a fairly short RPG, it's an RPG of small, manageable numbers.

At level 22, equipped with the Lazy Shell and the Quartz Charm, Mario doles out 500 damage per turn against the game's final boss. No more than fifteen turns of that damage alone ends him.

Your characters' HP isn't likely to climb much higher than 200.

The game pools together your party's MP into a number that maxes out at 99.

For whatever bizarre reason, you can only ever carry a maximum of 999 coins. If you do so, you'll never be left with less than 300 coins after upgrading all five of your party members weapons and armour.

These relatively low numbers make the game supremely manageable and conceivable. These qualities make the game a welcome reprieve from other more expansive RPGs (like Dragon Quest IX, or the downright intimidating Xenoblade Chronicles), while also offering a ready amount of challenge in its hidden content. Not to mention the infamous achievement of winning the Super Suit for executing 100 consecutive Super Jumps on a single enemy.

So, though the challenge may be set outside of the main game, and the experience as a whole is short in comparison to other RPGs, Super Mario RPG's rich blend of its name's two key elements locks it firmly in place as a great classic of the 16 bit era of RPGs.

Grinding and jobs in Dragon Quest IX

Well, going and getting the fygg from Swinedimples Academy had no adverse effects on my game in Dragon Quest IX. Getting the fygg from Gleeba went off without a hitch.

Other than the fact that despite having a "Magic Key" I still can't open prison cell doors. Ah well.

At least the boss battle - a fight with Queen Voluptua's enlarged pet lizard - went incredibly well. No one died, and only minimal healing was needed. Such is to be expected from jumping ahead and then turning back, though.

Nonetheless, although I've taken an alternate route to this point in the game, I feel like Dragon Quest IX's bosses are lacking.

So far the only real strategy that's been needed is keeping a watchful eye on everyone's HP and getting your party's fastest members to heal the others - especially when someone's barely hanging onto life. Sure, certain enemies are resistant and weak to certain types of magics, but elemental advantage counts for little. Attacking an enemy with the right spell might add 10 to 20 more damage to your strike, but it's not like something weak to fire also gets burned, or something weak to water gets sopping and has its speed attribute take a hit.

All of that said, I am having fun playing the game. But I also find myself wishing that there was a way aside from grinding (or playing through events out of the "set" order) to topple powerful (boss) enemies.

Gaining more skill points at level ups would be a good start.

I'm only really upgrading two skill sets per character as it is, but I'm at the point where abilities and power ups are at least 10 points apart. Gaining 5 allocatable skill points per level means that if I concentrate on just one skill set abilities are two levels apart.

Having played Final Fantasy games with job systems such a long wait for job-specific abilities seems ridiculous to me. And, once again, I'm stumped as to why there aren't two different kinds of experience points in Dragon Quest IX: One kind for character levels and another for job levels. Were such the case then different monsters could at least offer more of one or the other, and gaining job-related skills wouldn't be so sluggishly tied to regular level building.

(Hopefully) the last glitch

At long last, we discover why Zael wants to be a knight. His village had none protecting it and so was razed in the most recent war. Zael wants to be a knight to prevent that from happening to other villages in the future (I guess). There's not much to make the reason stand out, but I'm glad that a reason beyond their coolness has been given.

As you may've guessed, tonight saw some more The Last Story action. Chapter six has proven longer than those that came before, but we cut the game off just before chapter seven's start. At least, it would make sense for the next scene to be the opening for a new chapter.

At any rate, the latest Final Fantasy games have been called "Final Hallway," and I'm beginning to see why (Though Sakaguchi, The Last Story's director, is less and less involved with that series). There aren't a whole lot of branching paths nor is there much exploring in The Last Story. Everything's quite linear, with some of the game's areas offering treasure to those willing to look around an otherwise innocent corner. But for the most part you just march forward from battle to battle. Though the battles can be spectacular.

Aside from glitching out the fight with the Terracor, the game's battles have been pretty engrossing so far. The glitch seems to have emerged from bouncing the armoured beast into the wrong corner at the wrong time - it got stuck, the sound effect for its rolling played on loop, and the beast somehow emanated a damage-inflicting force-field around itself. It looked as though it could still be damaged, but Mirania and Lowell's attack spells worked at the beast slowly. After a reset (followed by a couple game over screens (Zael's slash seems to require sight of the target, something the game's camera is not always keen on giving you), the beast was no more, Zael and Dagran's old friend Zoran was taken out, and the quest we were on was completed.

The game really puts its streamlined play to good use, making for a very quick-to-play RPG. So much streamlining might have a negative effect on character development, though.

Somehow I'm not convinced that Zael is as young and inexperienced as he's depicted, he just doesn't look it. Were he a sprite, doing things like looming over the previously rescued Lisa when the option "Touch her" is chosen after the scene where the two discuss lucky stars, might be endearing or even charming. But with a full 3D figure the same gesture just comes off as weird and laughable.

This incident left me wondering: Is The Last Story's visual style out of sync with its cutscenes/characters' style?

Ending a quest's lengthy hiatus

I never really played too many Dragon Quest games before taking up Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies nearly three years ago. Somehow, despite my appetite for 16-bit JRPGs I just never hunted down roms of the lauded series in my childhood, when time was mine and most of it was spent on the genre.

Maybe it's the come down from finishing Phantasy Star IV, but today's return session to Dragon Quest IX brought me right back into it. I'm sure having stopped right in the middle of the first big quest (the hunt for the black knight in Brigadoom) also made it easy for me to feel like I never left the game in the first place.

The game plays like so many JRPGs from the SNES era. Battles are turn-based, menus are deep, and the dungeons aren't so much expansive as they are tight. Brigadoom isn't a huge place, but it's got enough stairs and hidden rooms to keep you backtracking and wandering to find the right path. Plus, being able to see treasure chests and pots in adjacent, but seemingly inaccessible rooms is an invitation to deviate from the straight path to dungeon's end.

So far Dragon Quest IX's offered a fine mix of nostalgia and innovations on the formulae I remember from the 16-bit era's Final Fantasy series, Tales of Phantasia, the Lufia games, and even outliers like Secret of the Stars.

Away game special: A phantasy ended

It is done. With the power of three, Phantasy Star IV was finished in the space of a weekend. At a guess, the whole game took us about 20 hours to complete.

At that time, the game comes  up a bit short for a 16-bit JRPG. A lot of comparisons we're made to Chrono Trigger (another short game if you know it well) and I think the two games share more than relative shottness.

Both games have a sleek, slim main plot line. Both also use intuitive, pace-quickening combat mechanics. However, the games differ wildly in the range of their extra content.

Chrono Trigger has a quest or event for each character's best weapon (at least); Phantasy Star IV really only has quests to outfit two of your four core characters. We probably would've cared more about Gryz (the butt of nearly all of our jokes and riffs) if we could've walked through a chapter of his life for something to make him a worthwhile addition to our battle party.

Stepping away from matters of combat efficiency, we never really learn much of anything in-game about Phantasy Star IV's four non-core characters. The priest Raja is something of an exception here, but jovial, life-loving priest characters always have a tremendous presence.

Nonetheless, the game is, overall, something to experience (though, nostalgia aside, once is enough). Plus, Phantasy Star IV does something no Final Fantasy game has ever done: it effectively (and, a little affectively) ends its series' saga.

A Quick Chip

Having only had enough time for a quick session, my progress in Radiant Historia's almost negligible. Yet, battling more monsters, and working my way deeper into the mine has shown some of the game's drawbacks and some of its potential.

The battle system is definitely a nice variation on the usual turn-based system usually found in J-RPGs. However, the fact that you need to string attacks together to attack more than one enemy (at least for now) makes battles a little tedious.

At first this system's novel, and it introduces an element of strategy that's appreciated. Ultimately, though, the battle system suffers from the same thing that Final Fantasy games suffer from: A numbing wash-rinse-repeat cycle of spamming every enemy you meet with high powered, group attacking spells. The only difference with Radiant Historia is that what you wind up using over and over again in battle actually involves three steps.

On the exploration side of things, some progression in the game's puzzles is evident. Though right now the extent of it is the game's having two explosive barrels side by side, and two clearly seen rows of rocks to blow through. Still, I've plenty of the game to get through yet, so there may be a real head-scratcher eventually.