The Stack

Although I’ve been trying to play the Final Fantasy series in order, I skipped FF3. It’s never been released on any platform I own — heck, until recently, it hadn’t even been released in English. ¹There was an American release of a game called Final Fantasy III, but it was actually what we today call Final Fantasy VI. Some of the games were originally released only in Japan, but after FF7 they decided to sync up the numbers and do official English-language remakes of the skipped episodes. I tried playing a fan-made translation of FF3 on a NES emulator years ago, but found it unwieldy and confusing, and gave it up, hoping that the future would bring a better way to play it. In particular, it had this “Job” concept that was inadequately explained. Perhaps it was covered better in the docs, which I didn’t have.

FF4 didn’t have anything like the Job system — instead, it accomplished the same purpose, providing variability in gameplay, by swapping different player characters in and out a lot. But FF5 brought Jobs back.

This time I have documentation and an in-game tutorial to help me, but it was still confusing at first, because the whole idea is so contrary to both RPG convention and common sense. In essense: you can change a character’s class at any time (except during combat). I’m not talking about D&D-style multiclassing, I mean you can just turn your level 10 Thief into a level 10 White Mage, cast healing spells on your party, then turn him back to a Thief. It’s a little misleading to even talk about a “level 10 Thief” at all: it’s just a level 10 character who’s currently doing the Thief job.

“Surely there must be some kind of penalty for switching jobs willy-nilly!” one cries. No, there is not. Why should there be? Does D&D reward spellcasters for memorizing the same set of spells every day, or fighters for remaining loyal to a single suit of armor? Jobs in this game are like garments that you slip on to suit your current activities. Indeed, each job comes with its own outfit — or rather, four outfits, one for each player character. They get sillier as the game goes on. One job involves dressing up in an animal costume with big ears.

Each character also gets to use one feature they’ve earned from a different job. This is where it gets complicated. See, there are two parallel kinds of XP. You’ve got your conventional experience level system, which governs the character’s base stats (which are modified by the current job), and you’ve also got “ability points”, which are job-specific. Suppose, for example, you want a character who can both use a sword and cast healing spells. One way to go about this is to give someone the job of White Mage and go kill stuff for a while. A White Mage with enough Ability Points gets the privilege of keeping the ability to cast first-level White spells when switched to a different job. Get some more Ability Points and you can keep the ability to cast second-level White spells, and so on. Likewise, you can do it the other way around: if you gain enough Ability Points as a Knight, you can switch to White Mage and keep the ability to use a sword. (There are other jobs that use swords, but only the Knight lets you keep it.) Each playable character can only have one skill of this sort active at a time, but like the jobs themselves, you can switch the active skill at will.

The whole scheme seems tailor-made for people who like experimenting with different character classes. There are only four playable characters, but there are 22 jobs, including exotic things like Geomancer and Chemist. Naturally I want to try them all. The game doesn’t make all of the jobs available at the beginning, but releases them in batches after certain major plot events, with the more experimental ones appearing later.

Later installments in the series kept the idea of on-the-fly character customization, but the two that I’ve played used different mechanisms for it. In FF7, it was part of the Materia system, which broke things down into more elementary units — instead of a Thief job with such features as enhanced speed and the ability to steal, “Speed Plus” and “Steal” are separate materia that can be used together or independently. In FF8, there’s a system of “Guardian Forces” that enhance their bearers in various ways, including providing the ability to enhance certain stats by attaching spells to them. The FF7 system is a lot simpler than the Job system, the FF8 system a lot more complicated. But all three of them have one thing in common: “action points”, the parallel XP. When I played FF7, it seemed odd that materia — magic stones slotted into weapons or armor — gained experience levels along with their users. But now I see where that comes from.

Like many people, I came to the Final Fantasy series late. I was in fact completely unaware of its existence until FF7, which got a bigger marketing push than usual and was available for PC. I played that when it was new, and the PC version of FF8 well after it became old, and somewhere in between I started playing through the Playstation remakes of the earlier games. I’m up to episode 5 by now.

I’m doing this mainly because I’m a completist (obviously), but also because it’s fascinating to me to see how the franchise evolved. Final Fantasy I was basically just another Ultima-style ¹ “Ultima” means “final” in Latin. Coincidence? Probably. tile-based fantasy RPG in a quasi-medieval setting, with monsters lifted straight from D&D, turn-based combat, ciphers for heroes, and a shadow of a plot organized around defeating four elemental “fiends”. How did it get from there to what I know from the later episodes — the playful mishmash of genres, the bizarre monstrosities, the lengthy examination of player character backstories?

Piece by piece, that’s how. By FF5, we have distinctive characters and most of the basics of FF7/8 gameplay (including the “ATB” combat system), but the milieu is still standard high fantasy, and the plot is still based around the four elements. The monsters are starting to get weird, though. The real acid trips tend to come at higher levels, but I’ve already encoutnered skullclouds and cats that fly by means of batwings strapped to their forelegs.

Well, I’ve won. The endgame consists of a sequence of elite trainer battles in which all of the opponent pokémon were substantially higher level than mine. Between battles, you get to apply any healing items you’ve brought with you, but you can’t alter your team. Fortunately, the elite trainers make the same mistake as all the other bosses: specializing. Lack of diversity makes your team weak. My final team consisted of Blenkinsop the Alakazam, Ellington the Dragonair, Stirbridge the Gyarados, and the three Legendary Birds: Loolah, Hoagie, and Brenda. That’s Psychic, Dragon, Water, Ice, Electric, and Fire types covered; despite the level gap, most of the enemies could be dispensed with in one or two hits from the right one. Ellington is pretty much the only one who didn’t pull his weight. Loolah actually gained a level and learned a new attack in the middle of one of the battles. It’s a good ending: it shows off how powerful you’ve become without actually being all that difficult.

After you win, Professor Oak, who sent you on the whole adventure in the first place, informs you that the reason you won is that you treat your pokémon with care and respect, or something like that. I suppose there’s some basis to this: in gameplay terms, it translates to training pokémon by hand, rather than taking shortcuts like catching them at high levels, or using Rare Candy or the Day Care Center to raise their level without combat. Doing things the hard way results in more powerful pokémon at a given level.

Not long ago, I mentioned how collection elements are shoehorned into games where they don’t really belong in order to provide “replay value”. Pokémon really stands in contrast to this. The collection is a natural part of the game; if anything, it’s “winning” that’s grafted on artificially. From a collector’s point of view, though, there’s still a point to finishing the story: it grants access to the Unknown Dungeon.

I had found the entrance to the Unknown Dungeon during my revisitng-everything phase. At the time, there was a guard standing in front of it saying that only the reigning Pokémon League champion was allowed in. Well, that’s me now. I’ve only explored the dungeon a little, but it’s full of high-level wild pokémon, including evolved forms of things that I had only seen unevolved in the wild previously. So suddenly there’s the option of completing my pokédex (to the extent possible) by catch-and-release means rather than through the level grind. After all, it’s “gotta catch ’em all”, not “gotta keep ’em all”.

At any rate, I’m going to take a break from this game for a while, but I don’t consider it to be off the Stack yet, even though I’ve won. I’ve still got a Master Ball with Mewtwo’s name on it. I haven’t decided yet what that name is, but there’s plenty of time for that later.

Coincidentally, the ever-popular Penny Arcade has been doing a whole lot of Pokémon-related strips lately. I note in particular that the latest strip makes a joke about a player trading pokemon with himself. This is something that reads differently if you’re familiar with the game. As I’ve pointed out, there are legitimate reasons in the game to prefer a traded to an untraded pokémon, and there are probably people who really do buy two gameboys and two Pokémon cartridges in order to take advantage of this. To one who doesn’t know the game, trading with yourself seems pointless. To one who is, it just seems sad.

They’re presumably into it because of the recent release of the “Diamond” and “Pearl” editions for the Nintendo DS. From what they say, it’s clear that the complexity has been kicked up several notches from the original: they talk about things like breeding pokémon. In the version I know, pokémon are just generated spontaneously from grassy areas by the friction generated when you walk through them. There’s a variety that comes in what are identified male and female forms, but there’s no real reason to believe that they do anything about it. But apparently nowadays breeding your own pokémon is an essential way to get specimens with certain special properties. I remember a sub-game like this in Final Fantasy VII, breeding chocobos in order to get ones that can win races more easily, but also to get special ones that can fly over mountains and oceans. But that was a minor aside in a larger game, whereas Pokémon is all about acquiring special creatures, so it sounds like this is a core part of the game mechanic now. The whole idea seems daunting, but it’s probably more intellectually involving than the level grind.

It also raises the interesting possibility that chocobos might be a lost tribe of pokémon. Must investigate further.

To expand on the last thing I said in the previous post: Pretty much all CRPGs reward repetitive activity to some degree, allowing the player to get by on effort alone if they can’t work out the efficient way to do things. This is an important part of the genre: it’s the thing that makes it possible to still make progress in every play session even if you’re stuck in the plot and puzzles (if there are any).

But few games are repetitive in the way that Pokémon is. In most games with a level grind, there’s an expectation that you’ll pass through each level only once. You go hunting for gnolls in Blackburrow or whatever, and eventually you’ve got enough experience that you can take on something stronger than gnolls, and so you leave Blackburrow behind. But in Pokémon, there’s a separate grind for each pokémon you capture. You can have everything in your party up to level 30, and then suddenly catch a new guy who’s level 15 and evolves at level 28. You can put him in a party with a bunch of strong guys, have him never actually participate in combat and just leech XP off the others, but he’s going to level faster if he can win fights by himself. Eventually, you’ll want to take him off to an area that’s appropriate to his level.

(Come to think of it, this is kind of what Wizardry was like. Except there, the reason you kept having to level up new characters was to replace the ones who died.)

Or consider the case of Georgeson the Sandslash. Georgeson is one of the first pokémon I caught, back when he was just a sandshrew. I levelled him up to the point of evolving, then just stuck him in storage and forgot about him. It was only when searching for a team to take on Zapdos that I found a new use for him. See, part of my plan (as detailed in the last post) was to use an accuracy-reduction attack, such as Sand Attack, to keep the fearsome avian from knocking out my guys in a single hit. I had used McNaughton the Pidgeotto for this purpose in the battle with Articuno, but flying pokémon are really vulnerable to electrical attacks. Whereas ground pokémon seem to be completely immune to them. Georgeson was the only ground-type I had that knew this attack — his time to shine! Except he was only level 22, hardly capable of hitting a level 50 flying opponent. I took him out, intending to level him up to 30 or so.

I still think this would have worked, too, if I hadn’t been so impatient. I got him as far as level 23, then threw caution to the wind. It all worked out well — Georgeson was taken out with a single non-electrical attack (Drill Peck), and without his protection, a couple of other members of the team went down as well. But I had brought a certain amount of redundancy along, two pokémon with sleep attacks, two with wrap, so it all came off regardless.

I’m still impatient, though. And I still have a lot of pokémon to evolve. I’m thinking that I’ll spend maybe a day or two more on this and then give it a break regardless of whether I’ve found Leader #8 by then or not.

Seven Pokémon Leaders down, one to go. The first seven have their names and locations listed in the manual; the eighth is something of a mystery. I could find out where he is by reading spoilers online, but for the moment, I’d rather search for him myself. After all, I’m going to have to spend some time just wandering around in order to level up my team. I might as well have a goal in mind while I do it.

Thus begins the phase of the game wherein one revisits all the previous areas and looks for places that were previously impassable, but which one now has the tools to pass. This is always a fairly satisfying part of a game, for the same reason that hunting for secrets is satisfying — indeed, in many games this is the secret-hunting phase. Here, I’m hunting not for secrets but for the last remaining plot token. But in the process, I’m finding secrets. In particular, I’ve found Zapdos, another of the Legendary Birds.

Now, since my TPK, I’ve managed to capture Articuno (who, thanks to the trainer’s naming privilege, is now known as Loolah). Capturing a pokémon is much harder than defeating it, especially if it’s stronger than your own pokémon. At bottom, all you have to do to capture a pokémon is get into a fight with it, then throw an empy pokéball at it (by selecting the pokéball in the “use item” menu). But there’s a chance that you’ll miss, and even if you hit, there’s a chance that the victim will break free and continue the fight. More expensive balls are harder to break, and you can get an advantage by beating up on it first: the lower you get its hit points, the lower its chance of breaking free. But you have to be careful not to do too much damage and inadvertently end the battle. (I’d say that they’re useless to you dead, but technically, pokémon never die as a result of fighting; they just “faint”. This makes more sense of the ability to revive your fainted pokémon, but less sense of the fact that you can’t capture them in that state.) So you’re pulling your punches, but your opponent isn’t.

After a couple of failures, I bagged Articuno with a team that, between them, had the following crucial abilities:

• Sleep attacks: not only does a sleeping opponent not attack, it’s a lot easier to hit with the pokéball.
• Accuracy-reduction attacks: to make it less likely that it’ll wipe you out when it wakes up.
• Wrap: This is a move learnable by things with vines or tentacles. It’s an attack that lasts multiple turns, until you decide to break it off or the opponent breaks free; while wrapped, the opponent doesn’t get to attack and receives a small amount of damage every turn. I had almost written this off as useless — why do a small amount of damage over multiple turns when you can do a whole lot of damage all at once? But turns out to be ideal for edging the opponent’s hit points down to just short of fainting.
• Surf: needed just to get to Articuno’s hideout in the first place.

Also, of course, the team had to minimize vulnerability to Articuno’s cold-based attacks. Even with all this planning, the sleeping bird managed to break six or seven Ultra pokéballs before it stayed caught.

Capturing Zapdos will probably be broadly similar, but with the additional constraint that I need both Surf and Cut to reach it, and the attacks are electrical this time. A glance at the vulnerability chart shows that my best bet here is probably ground-type pokémon. Do I even have any ground types with the abilities listed above? I don’t know; I haven’t had to face situation like this before.

On the whole, I’m enjoying the challenge of the difficult captures much more than the XP grind: reviewing my lists, picking out a team with just the right skills like it’s Mission: Impossible or something. Unfortunately, the game is really geared more towards the grind. There’s an XP reward for defeating the same enemies over and over, but no real motivation to capture more than one of each species. You’re even punished a little for capturing a difficult high-level pokémon instead of capturing a low-level one and levelling it up: the latter results in pokémon with higher stats. I’d call this a flaw, but it’s probably part of what made the game a success. The fact that persistence is more valuable than skill or cleverness makes the game more accesible.

There are three reasons to trade pokémon. First, as I’ve said before, there are some species that can only be obtained in a specific version of the game. Pokémon (Red Version) provides oddishes but not bellsprouts, Pokémon (Blue Version) is the reverse. Since oddishes and bellsprouts fill similar niches, it’s reasonable for two people with different colors to trade the one for the other. There are other similar cases.

Second, there are some species that are native to no version of the game. I’ve talked about how some species “evolve” into new forms in response to some stimulus. In most cases, the stimulus is reaching a certain experience level. In a few cases, it’s being exposed to a special object. The eevee is notable in that it can evolve into three separate forms depending on which of three objects is used on it: fire stone, thunder stone, or water stone. But in four particular cases, the stimulus that triggers evolution is being traded. You give someone a graveler, and it immediately starts turning into a golem. At one point, an associate and I traded a kadabra for a haunter, then immediately traded the resulting alakazam and gengar back, giving us both the benefit of having “caught” all four species.

The third reason is that traded pokémon get a substantial bonus to all experience they earn, making them advance faster than non-traded pokémon. This provides a motivation to trade even when you don’t gain a species you didn’t have otherwise. Interestingly, there are several non-player characters in the game who will trade pokémon with the player — there are even some species that can only be obtained from trades with NPCs. The pokémon obtained this way are treated by the game as obtained in trades, and thus get the same experience bonus as ones obtained in a real trade between two players. ¹ Or at least two Gameboys. There are probably people who trade with themselves, but that’s getting into “what’s the point” territory if you ask me. Cinnabar Island, which I have just reached, has at least three NPCs who trade pokemon, making it the densest trade center in the world; the rest of the traders are just scattered around on roadways and the like. I haven’t been taking advantage of the offered trades, because pokemon that are raised by hand from an early level get better stats than ones produced by the game. But maybe I should. When I’m racing to get the entire collection to their final evolutions, that experience bonus would come in handy.

At any rate, my trade list is now online.

Exploring the Safari Zone yielded the two HMs that I was missing. In fact I really only needed one of them, as I had acquired in a trade a pokémon with the Strength skill. But the other one held the secret of Surf, which allows a swimming pokémon to carry its trainer over water. This is a pretty big deal, because it opens up the few remaining unexplored corners of the map. Choosing a random direction, I found myself at the Seafoam Islands.

Now, in this game, when you enter a new area for the first time, you immediately start encountering new types of pokémon. I picked up several new specimens in the water, and another in an island cave. Every single one of the new finds is a species that can evolve with experience, so it’s clear that I’m going to have to spend some time XP farming. An exploration into that cave shows that the random encounters are around level 30, the highest level I’ve seen yet, which makes it the ideal place for this. I go back to the nearest pokémon center ¹ The pokémon centers are like your base camps. There’s one in every town, and you can access your stored pokémon and alter your party roster there, as well as heal your wounded pokémon for free. and pick out some water-resistant pokémon in in the 20-30 range that I want to advance. Blenkinsop I leave behind. He doesn’t need the exercise.

My first few sallies go according to the usual formula: I wander around looking for stuff to beat up until my own guys are significantly hurt, then fall back to the pokémon center for healing. But the center is inconveniently far away. What I really want to do is find a way through the cave, in the hope of finding a route to Cinnabar Island, where the next Pokémon Leader lives. I figure there’s got to be a pokémon center there, like in every other town I’ve been to. So I start delving deeper.

The caves contain a puzzle involving pushing boulders around to ultimately block a stream so you can get across it without being carried away by the current. There’s a little bit of Sokoban action involved, but mainly there’s a part where you push a boulder down a series of holes to successively lower levels, then climb back up to the first level, then push another boulder down a different series of holes. All the while fending off level 30 pokémon. By the time I finished this, a couple of my pokémon were down for the count — pokémon never really die in this game, they just fall unconscious until you revive them — and the rest were at least somewhat hurt. But it was a long way back, so I kept going.

Reaching an unexplored level, I spied a little bird sitting on a rock. I did what you always do on seeing something novel: I walked up to it and pressed the A button. It turned out to be Articuno, one of the three Legendary Birds, each unique. It’s level 50, and quite capable of wiping out anything I have with me in a single blow. So do I flee? Goodness no. This is a one-time encounter! If I flee, I’ll never get another chance to catch Articuno.

I suppose I should have used the unescapable Master Ball at this point, but it didn’t even occur to me. Instead, I had my first TPK ² Total Party Kill in quite some time, and switched the Gameboy off without saving.

A TPK in Pokémon isn’t as bad as it is in most games. It doesn’t end the game, and the only consequence is that you get sent back to the last pokémon center with half your cash gone. If I had less cash, I might be willing to accept that price. My pokémon had gained a lot of XP in that last adventure, after all. But I’m saving up for a porygon. The porygon is a pokémon that can only be obtained from a Team Rocket casino as a prize. It costs 6500 coins, where coins are either obtained from slot machines (the only game the casino runs) or, if necessary, purchased outright from the casino, 1000 units of money ³ I don’t think the monetary unit in this game has a name! Strange that I never noticed this before. for 50 coins. Now, the slot machines have a skill element — it’s one of those things where pictures go whizzing by very fast and you press a button to make them stop. But this is difficult enough for me that I’ve pretty much given up on the prospect of ever winning 6500 coins, and have decided to just pay 130000 moneys for them. Which I’ve been very close to being able to afford for a while.

In fact, now that I’ve checked, I see that I now actually have enough. Next stop: the casino, where my wad of cash will no doubt help to fund Team Rocket’s nefarious activities well into the next year. And then: exploration without fear of death!

Six badges now. Blenkinsop is level 46, and the only thing I’ve faced that posed any difficulty for him (or his assistant, Pratchett the Hypno) was Sabrina, Pokémon Leader of Saffron City. She specializes in psychic pokémon, and has a high-level alakazam of her own. Mine was bigger, but the key problem is that her alakazam knows Recover, a move that lets it heal itself in battle. At first, I was powerless to do more damage than it could recover in a single round. I eventually managed to give it the “paralysis” status effect, which makes it randomly skip turns, and then reduced its “special” rating, which seems to govern how much it can heal in a turn. After simply overpowering things for so long, it was nice to have a battle that actually required some tactics.

Before I could challenge Sabrina, I had to chase Team Rocket out of town. Team Rocket is one of those things that was drastically changed in the cartoon, which turned them into bumbling comic villains. Here, they’re more sinister and menacing, or at least as sinister and menacing as you can get when you’re displayed in a severely chibi style most of the time. They’re somewhere between gangsters and nazis, and their stated goal is to take over the world using an army of enslaved pokémon. I’m not quite clear on how this enslaving pokemon differs from what the player character does, but presumably it’s somehow worse than beating them up until they can’t resist being imprisoned in a pokéball from which they’re only taken out to fight other captives for their master’s amusement.

Before I kicked them out, Team Rocket was infesting the headquarters the Silph Company, which does pokémon-related research. The Silph Building is an eleven-story teleporter maze. As such, it constitutes a puzzle unrelated to the game’s core mechanic. I noticed a couple of other sections like that when I was wandering around trying to figure out what to do. For example, one town has a building with a maze of arrows, where stepping on an arrow tile makes you keep going in that direction until you hit an obstacle. I had solved that maze during my first Pokémon kick, but had completely forgotten that it existed. The memorable thing, the distinctive thing, in this game is obviously the pokémon. Mazes of this sort have nothing to do with pokémon; they could be shoved into any game, and often are. You can call it variety elements, varying the gameplay to keep unrelieved fight scenes from getting tedious ¹ Speaking of tedious, unrelieved fight scenes, I saw the Michael Bay Transformers movie recently. Is there a videogame adaptation of this flick yet? Such a thing would be an oddity to rival Lego Star Wars: an adaptation chain that goes toys — cartoon — movie — game. , or you can call it filler. If you ask me, what it shows in this particular game is a certain lack of confidence on the part of the designers. I mean, Pokémon took risks. For all that it’s based on established RPG mechanics, it was a new paradigm, and no one knew how successful it would be, so can they be blamed for hedging their bets by throwing in some relatively safe generic content? I know that something of this sort happened in the development of Thief: The Dark Project, resulting in the combat-oriented “monster” levels that are generally regarded as the game’s weak spot. It’s not even really a phenomenon unique to games. Consider Don Quixote: Book 1 contains numerous digressions, essentially embedded novellas detailing the backstories of various secondary characters and the like, apparently because Cervantes didn’t think that the satire of chivalric romance would maintain the reader’s interest. By the time he wrote book 2, he knew better, and the digressions disappeared.

I’m in a bit of a hurry to get today’s post up, so I’ll be brief. I have already had several acquaintances on the east coast say that I should have picked Pokémon up again before moving, that they would have been willing to trade with me at that point. Unfortunately, I was saving Pokémon as something to play during the move — something I could play while my other gaming devices were packed up. But as it turned out, moving occupies enough of one’s attention that I didn’t do any gaming at all until I had the PS2 set up, so that was futile.

Well, I do intend to come back east once in a while. I have parents out there, and will probably come back sometime around Christmas, if not sooner. Will I still want to trade pokémon then? Quite possibly; I’m seeing this as something of a long-term project. Catching ’em all can’t be done all at once. If you try, you’ll be bored to tears.

Beating the eight Pokémon Leaders and completing the plot of the game is another matter. I’ll probably make a run for that soon — I think I have the fighting power to do it, and just need to find the rest of the HMs to get past the obstacles on the way. (HM stands for Hidden Machine; they’re a variant of the TM, or Technical Machine. Both varieties are used to teach special moves, but HMs teach skills that can be used outside of combat, such as cutting through brush or lifting heavy rocks.) I could be wrong about having the power, of course, but my toughest contender, a level 42 alakazam ¹ Blenkinsop, as you may remember from the previous post , is currently defeating everything he meets with a single blow of his psychically-endowed brain.

So, my plan right now is to get through the story, become the ultimate trainer or whatever, and then put Pokémon on the back burner for a while. When I have a chance, I’ll post my list here to facilitate arranging trades. It’s probably going to be tricky to get unevolved charmander and bulbasaur, which can only be gotten once, at the very beginning of the game — there’s an initial choice of three, and I chose the squirtle. The point being, if you haven’t turned yours into a charmeleon and/or ivysaur yet, you probably aren’t into the game enough to dig your cartridge out of storage and arrange a time and place to meet. But hey, maybe you saw someone playing the DS version and got nostalgic for your first Pokémon experience. Maybe you want to start over, classic-style. And if you do, maybe you want to start over with a golem or a gengar or a level 42 alakazam instead of that wimpy bulbasaur.