We’ve linked videos in this series many times before, but it’s wuite a doozy this time. Final Fantasy is known to have a number of combat bugs. Critical Hit chances are determined by the index of the weapon in the weapon table, not the stat in that table; weapon special properties just don’t work, regardless of what the Nintendo Power Strategy Guide says; and more.

This isn’t just an explication of those bugs though, it goes through all of how basic (non-magic) combat works in the game, explaining the value of all the stats. That’s one of the things about RPGs: you’re told items are “+4 better,” but often those values don’t match up to what they’d mean in D&D, where a plus is usually either a one-point increase in damage, a 5% improvement on odds for something, or both. Final Fantasy’s attack roll turns out to be a 1-in-200 die, so, a mere +1 is negligible to attack odds.

They probably didn’t elaborate on what these numbers mean in the manual because, at the time, Square and Nintendo were keen to get players hooked on Final Fantasy and other JRPGs, and nothing would dissuade them from picking up the game than to be confronted with battle formulae in the manual. Looks too much like school work! But they could have at least mentioned something about relative chances?

If you really want to know what the numbers mean, the video is there waiting for you. You can just let your eyes glaze over during the math if you want. I won’t tell the teacher!

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The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

We posted to the long-lived FFVI site (which a handful of old people may still think of as Final Fantasy III) Caves of Narshe a few days ago. In looking up stuff about it I ran across a few other sites too that I figured I might call out. Because while humans may read this site, Google reads it too, and if I can help those other sites somehow rank above the evil and exploitive Fandom sites, then I think I can devote a day’s post to that cause.

I am being hyperbolic when I say that video game sites used to be 10% of the internet by weight, but it doesn’t feel like it. And that used to be a good thing. Nowadays it seems like many of the people who were enthusiastic about both games and the internet also have strong opinions about Ethics In Game Journalism and 8chan. I don’t know if that’s true about the people I’m linking to now; I can only hope that it isn’t.

There’s Imzogelmo’s Final Fantasy III, who wrote game patches for the ROM, tools for examining it and investigations of how it works.

Djibriel’s page Collapse of Heaven and Earth is hosted by Caves of Narshe, and bears information on FFVI, FFV and a couple of other games.

Also hosted on CoN is Master ZED’s list of FFVI (III) patches. These patches are useless to people playing the remakes of course: the ones for Playstation, Gameboy Advance, mobile (which I hear are gone now, good job SquareEnix), Steam, Switch and probably other platforms. There are some guides here too. One entertaining one, if you are entertained by the kinds of things that I’m entertained by, is SharkESP’s Low Level FAQ, a monument to breaking the game.

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In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.

The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.

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But now they’ve completed their four-part series, each at three-plus hours, on one of the most iconic JRPGs from the era, Final Fantasy IV, which of course got released in Western markets as Final Fantasy II. It goes over everything in the game, every secret, every step of the story, a lot of cool tricks and strategies, and more.

I understand some people use this as background for doing other things, or as their adult replacement for Saturday morning cartoons (look them up). In any case, it makes for a lot of viewing, so block off a fair amount of time for this.

Here are the direct links and embeds:

Part 1: Beginning to Cecil’s promotion to Paladin (3h44m)

Part 2: To Dr. Lugae in the Tower of Bab-Il (4h8m)

Part 3: The Underworld and up to the Bahamut optional fight on the Moon (4h17m)

And finally:

Part 4: The remainder of the game, and the ending (3h38m)

If you think this is huge, it’s only going to get huge-r when they reach Final Fantasy VI (er, III)!

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

There was a period during the 8-bit era where games best known for being on the NES could get ports to other machines. Most of the ports we got in the US and Europe were not that great. There were a fair number of classic NES games with lackluster home computer adaptions. Even the best of these, like Mighty Bomb Jack, Castlevania and Life Force for the Commodore 64, usually paled compared to their NES counterparts.

I put the blame for this on the cartridge format. While a much more expensive media for releasing software than disks or tapes, it had the great advantage of being enormously flexible. The whole phenomena of mapper chips and other in-cart add-on hardware on the NES had no counterpart on the C64 during its heyday, even though there was really no reason the ’64 couldn’t use the same kinds of chips that the NES used.

Things were a little different in Japan on their native microcomputer platforms. While anemic ports were certainly possible there (like the infamous Super Mario Bros. Special) a fair number of console games got pretty good computer ports. Many of the best of these were for the Sharp X68000, a system I really must cover in detail soon, but the MSX platform got a fair number, many due to the efforts of Konami.

Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for MSX ports with their own unique properties. Today’s post is about Final Fantasy, which recently got an English translation, and which in play and structure resembles its NES original to a large degree. It’s even a slight upgrade, with more colors in its characters and able to make use of an MSX sound expansion cartridge for improved music.

The game was reimplemented from the ground up, so it’s even missing many of the bugs that the Famicom original, forged out of raw bytecode as it was by consummate hacker Nasir Gebelli, is known to have. It would probably be the definitive early version of Final Fantasy if it didn’t play painfully slowly. You can’t see it in these screenshots, but instead of the world sliding smoothly across the screen as on the NES the terrain snaps by in eight pixel steps, and your party also walks more slowly than on Nintendo’s machine. And while it’s not as bad as loading times in the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy games, the game still lingers on a blank screen for several seconds when fights begin and end, which will drive you nuts before long.

The English translation patch that FCandChill put together basically just uses the NES game’s script, so no surprises there. These days games in the style of those early JRPGs are quite out of style, but if you still have a hankering to play a game that basically demands that you grind out levels to have a chance and where you will almost certainly total party wipe at least once during your run, you could do worse.

English translation patch of Final Fantasy for the MSX2 (romhacking.net)

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Live A Live is currently the toast of the Switch, with over 500,000 in sales since it was released. Not bad at all for a remake of a Super Famicom game from Square’s classic era that had never made it out of Japan until now.

AustinSV on Youtube presents a video that goes into some detail about what was changed between the versions. If you’ve played the original (I’ve played a fair bit of it through the popular fan translation from Aeon Genesis), you’ll know a few things were definitely tweaked. I remember the Prehistory, by far the funniest chapter, being rather more risque in its humor, although the fart jokes and poop flinging were left mostly intact. Some of the changes are really interesting; they translated the whole Middle Ages chapter in iambic pentameter!

Which Version of Live A Live Should You Play? The Original + Switch Remake Reviewed & Compared (Youtube, 16 minutes)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Found on Nintendo Everything and reported by Brian, the Wii shop channel is back online after an absence of months. It had been down for “maintenance.” Mind you, it’s still impossible to buy software that hadn’t been purchased before 2019. It’s still just a way to reacquire things you had already bought. Sigh.

Ed Smith at PCGamesN notes a speedrunner at this year’s SGDQ has admitted to faking parts of his run, passing off a played-back video instead of performing it in real time, and has been banned from future events. While SGDQ was held in person this year, a few of their runs were still done remotely, and the faked run was one of those. The player in question is Mekarazium, and the run was for Metal Gear Rising (focusing eyes on paper) “Revengeance.”

At NintendoLife, Alana Hauges reviews Square Enix’s remake of the classic Japan-only JRPG anthology Live-A-Live, which I’m given to understand is pronounced like “Lighve Alive,” with long-I sounds. It’s been given the Octopath Traveler treatment, with pixel art akin to the original game placed in a 3D environment. It’s structured like a collection of short stories, all greatly different from the others. I have experience with the original game, and it contains several extremely interesting sections, including a space mystery, a Wild West puzzle segment, and a hugely complex and interesting ninja infiltration scenario where the player has to make many choices that each affect the outcome. While in the end all of the stories are linked together, on their own each is a small complete game in its own right. It’s long been a shame that the game as been unknown outside of Japan, and I’m excited to see it getting a chance elsewhere.

CBR’s Zachary Pilon rhetorically asks, why are roguelikes so popular? WHY INDEED IT IS AN MYSTERY. (Note: rodneylives spent like four years writing about them back at GameSetWatch.)

At The Verge, Andrew Webster states that the Playdate’s launch was a unique opportunity for small dev. People who bought the device have access to a number of games released periodically in a “season,” but software can also be loaded onto the system separately, and itch.io has an active community of these developers.

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