Final Fantasy: Do You Want to Get in the Barrel?

Oxyale1 in hand, I headed back to the submarine in Onrac.

The girl standing if front of it was happy to see I had it. She exhorted me to “save the mermaids”, then she kind of floated away. The float-away was kind of slow and awkward. Everyone was a little uncomfortable.

Then the game presented me with an interesting question:

Hey kids, here's a pro-tip: the answer to this question is always NO.

There is never any situation where the answer to “Do you want to get in the barrel?” is Yes.

So I got in the barrel. I was treated to a bit of a cut scene and found myself in the Sunken Shrine. I fought my way to the top level and came across a bunch of mermaids. They were less impressed by my legs than the townsfolk in Onrac, but they were surprised to see that I could breathe underwater.

Because these legs aren't REALLY mine!?

See, that is an appropriate question to ask someone: “You can BREATHE underwater?” It is so much more reasonable than, “Are those REALLY your legs?”

More interesting was this exchange:

So it would appear that it’s hard to get into the tower in the desert, and that there’s an instrument or chime that is a key of some sort. I also found a “Rosetta Stone”:

This is, as any student of history knows, a reference to expensive software that will teach you to say "I am a United States wanting a talk box to buy cheese pie" in a couple dozen languages.

Anyway, after talking to them all and collecting some nice armor, I headed down for the lowest level.

We are ourselves, and we still don't know just who we are. Seriously, we just showed up in front of a castle and started murdering goblins. No idea what's happening. Yurto keeps mumbling about unicorns eating his wife or something, but that's all we've got.

Some of the fights have started to get a little more challenging. The majority aren’t, though, and when they are, it’s because the enemy is paralyzing my characters or because they can do an insta-kill attack or something. But still, nothing to really worry about.

I eventually found Kraken. The fight went about as quickly as with Marilith. To illustrate, I went back to a previous save and recorded the fight.

That’s it. And here’s the thing: even the precautions I took here were probably a waste of time and spell points. I probably should have just attacked with my fighters (though they wouldn’t have done much damage without the Hastes) and had Yurto cast only Thundaga until Kraken croaked. Not that it really matters.

This, so far, is the biggest weakness of Final Fantasy on the PSP. It is just too easy. This is the 3rd of 4 Fiends. They are supposed to be major bosses, and they are pushovers. I did do some leveling early on before I fought the first fiend, but I’m not intentionally leveling anymore. However, I’m still gaining levels like crazy (I’m in the mid-40s now) and I haven’t had a single difficult fight. I don’t even know how not to level: the random encounters in dungeons are very, very frequent.

I honestly thought this game would be much harder. I remember dying quite a bit more in Final Fantasy IV and VI, at least in boss fights. Again, the difficulty may have been lowered for the PSP version. I think this was based on the old port to the original Playstation, but I never played that version. So I don’t know if this is unique to the PSP or not.

I mentioned before that I would try the original after beating this. I will definitely do that.

Oh, and one more thing. What the hell is this?

10 gil?! Screw this quest. With that kind of money I can retire and live a life of leisure.

Seriously. I am most of the way through the game and I keep coming across chests with tiny amounts of gil in them. Keep in mind that there are other chests around them with large amounts. There are also chests with little items like Potion, Antidote, etc. I just don’t get it. Is it a joke? I kind of laughed the first couple times, but it just keeps happening. Very weird.

  1. Is that pronounced ox-yale? Oxy-ale? Oaks-Yaw-lee?

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