Dead Red Redemption — Rants at a Picnic

This post will make the most sense to people who have actually played FF1. But it should still have a familiar ring to anyone who has played any old console based RPG.

The Bible speaks of “keeping your eye simple.” It’s very good advice, and my father got busy taking it to heart. In the process of simplifying his life, he offloaded his Nintendo Wii onto us. The addition of the Wii was quite welcome in our home, since we were already living simpler than most folks, and I’d been wanting one since shortly before they came out.

After fiddling with the device for a couple of weeks, I found out that one can download classic NES games and play them on the new console! I found FF1 on the available download list and decided that I should finally finish it. In the years I had owned that game, I had made it far enough to open the pass to the outside ocean, but never even managed to light the first of the four orbs. After two days on the emulator, I had two of them lit!

It was becoming a problem that my fighters were on level 21, but my red mage was still on level 17. All through the game, that mage simply refused to stay alive long enough to collect any XP. I spent a large part of my time hauling his stupid carcass back to a town to be revived. Tonight, I wouldn’t bother with the ice cave. It would be better just to spend a half hour or so just leveling up my mage. He went to the front of the party where he would get the first attack and the lions share of the XP, and we sailed off for the far side of the map.

The ocean was lousy with laughably weak nuisance creatures who didn’t know any better than to get in my way. One hit from my weakest guy would be enough to kill one of these beasts seven times over, so I wasn’t really worried about the dangers of the voyage, but each and every time one popped up, I had to spend 50 to 90 seconds going through all the dialogs to kill it.

Five SHARKS appear.
The monsters strike first.
SHARK attacks, misses.
SHARK attacks, misses.
SHARK runs away.
SHARK attacks, misses.
My orders: Attack SHARK, attack SHARK, attack SHARK, and attack SHARK.
SHARK attacks, misses.
I attack, SHARK loses badly.

The SHARKS dropped their wallets, and I picked them up to find that none of them had been to the ATM recently. I pocketed the chump change, and everyone got about 10 XP. Since they each need about 6000 more XP to level up, I continue sailing to the Great Northern Island of Big Bad Things. However, the voyage takes a good solid 15 minutes because the above scenario repeats on every other ocean tile of the entire 4096×4096 map!

We finally made it to the great northern island of big bad things, and I double checked that everyone was at full strength. I was quite ready to maintain this mage with powerful healing spells and scores of health potions. It was finally time to start leveling him up! The party had taken exactly two steps away from where we had parked the boat, when a big ugly magic thing jumped out from behind a shrubbery and cast YOULOSE on my mage! Just the mage! It was ineffective against everyone else. The mage fell down dead immediately, and his friends beat the snot out of the big ugly magic thing. But since the whole point of the quest was getting XP for the mage who was now dead, it was useless to keep going. So I got to spend another 15 minute dragging that jerk’s sorry dead butt back to the other side of the map!