Final Fantasy, Four White Mages

I'm getting ready to start another challenge quest on an old RPG. It's possible the first challenge quest I ever really heard of for any RPG, and one I've been interested in trying for many years.

I first read this challenge on a collectible card that was distributed by Nintendo Power Magazine long ago. I don't remember the cards very well; I think they might have been called Power Challenge Cards (or not). But they had cards for a large variety of early NES games, and probably Game Boy and SNES games too. And the cards contained ideas for giving yourself an extra challenge on the games.

At the time, Final Fantasy was one of my favorite games of all time. The challenge given on the card was to beat the game with four white mages. I thought that would be quite the challenge indeed, and kind of wanted to try it. But it's something I never got to. It's partly because you can only have one game file per cartridge and I had two brothers to share with (and don't much like erasing old files anyway). And partly because my copy of the game got stolen after a bit. And at some point, my gaming queue just got so long that I kind of forgot about it.

But I've been trying to decide on a good starting point for getting back into the Final Fantasy games, and I think it's as good as any.

I spend the last couple of weeks revisiting my last NES game file, from around 2003. I brought my characters on that file from about level 39 to max level, 50. That way I can feel a sense of closure on the file and erase it easier. I had other options to choose from (Famicom and Wii Virtual Console) but it felt right to do it on the NES.

I learned a lot about the game the last time I played it on the Famicom. I looked at a lot of online resources at that time, too, just for the heck of it. I was surprised by a lot of what I read.

First off, a great many quirks of the localization process obscured a lot of things from this game that were passed on to later games, but localized differently in those games. For example, staple Final Fantasy spells like Protect, Flare, and Holy, as well as were there from the beginning but named differently for a variety of reasons.

Secondly, a great amount of information I had taken for granted from the old Nintendo Power Strategy Guide is actually incorrect, and much of the game is bugged to not work as intended. For example, none of the weapon elemental or creature type bonuses actually work in the game. Some spells like LOCK and TMPR don't work at all, and apparently LOK2 actually helps the enemy rather than hurting it.

A lot of that was fixed in the Final Fantasy Origins port for Playstation, which I once started but never finished. I think I'll try playing that version alongside my NES one.

It's hard to add RPG's into my queue, but where this is an old one that I've played several times, and a relatively shorter one, I think I can manage it without disrupting the rest of my queue too much. I'll probably start one of the other more recent FF games as well before too long, but that will probably wait (at least) until I can finish Dragon Quest V.