I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls [HMSJayne Randomizer] (GBA, Played on Odin Pro) – It’s been a little while and I was feeling the urge to do another of the preset seeds they have available. (The full randomizer is on Github to download, but McAfee is utter convinced it’s a virus.) As noted last time, you automatically get the ship and “light a crystal” is one of the key items that gets randomized. I finished the sea shrine having lit all four crystals and was briefly convinced I didn’t need to go to Mirage Tower at all...and then realized I didn’t have the Lute! It was very entertaining that the rat tail and levistone were among the last things I found, long after getting both the class change and airship elsewhere. It’s also interesting how much it makes sense to basically play the game in order despite the randomization. (Some of that is the fact that Garland, Bikke and the Marsh Cave are the three key item locations you can reach without anything but the ship. The airship opens the upper Earth Cave (vampire/ruby), Gulg Volcano, the Ice Cave and the Caravan/fairy; but you still need the Canoe to reach the Castle of Ordeals or the Waterfall. Even when you raise levels very quickly and get overpowered equipment early, it makes much more sense to do those dungeons basically in order. (The Volcano is especially good to do earlier than in a standard run—the treasure chests could be loaded with great stuff!)

Zelda: A Link to the Past [Randomized] (SNES, Played on Odin Pro) – And speaking of randomized games, I decided to try this with a different set of options than the last time, a set that requires the full game completion. I had forgotten how much is gated by the Lamp! In addition to several “light four torches” spots, there are numerous dark rooms in the early dungeons. (I also got myself stuck because I forgot there was a chest in the early sewers, and that turned out to have the Bow.) I’m also half-convinced that despite my using the “no glitches” flag that the seed was actually unbeatable without them, because the keys were rearranged in the Ice Palace and the Big Key was unavailable, so you needed to somehow flip a crystal switch and get through a room that I couldn’t find a solution for besides bomb-jumping. But my biggest issue was despite getting plenty of heart containers, I didn’t get a single bottle or half-magic until Turtle Rock, and getting through the Dark World dungeons with no potions is a trick. (I think, while I enjoy the items being rearranged so I have to do the dungeons and overworld bits completely out of order, I don’t particularly like the map/compass/keys being rearranged within the dungeons themselves. Puzzling through the dungeons out of order isn’t that much fun. I suspect I can turn that flag off in the future.)

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest [Randomized] (SNES, Played on Odin Pro) – It’s impressive how fast this game goes when you’re earning triple XP, the battlefields are randomly 1-5 battles instead of 10, there are about half as many enemies so they’re often very easy to avoid, and your walking speed is increased. (I was also amused at the replacement dialogue.) It took about three hours to play through everything. I think I missed exactly one red chest—I didn’t have the best axe when I finished, but had everything else. Like FF1, while you can do some events out of order, it makes sense to mostly follow the regular plot progression because of enemy difficulty. I also set the flag for “progressive” weapons, so you always get them in order; and quest-based NPC levels, so each partner gains levels as you accomplish things in the game. I can see how “racing” this game becomes more viable when you can get through this fast (and there are definitely some settings that would be even faster), and I was being thorough—I think I could have skipped the Wind Crystal and a bunch of locations and gone straight to the Dark King, saving at least half an hour.

The 7th Saga [Randomized] (SNES, Played on Odin Pro) – When it comes down to it, the randomizer for this is just a difficulty modder: You can randomize the contents of chests, you can randomize stores, you can adjust stat gains and prices and enemy strengths and formations; but you can’t actually change the linear order of the game. You can play it with a character who gets random stat distributions, equipment options, and spell selections; but at the end of the day that character will still be following the same plot everybody does. (With the slight deviations for Olvan, LUX and Esuna, of course.) I pumped up the XP and stat gains, but ended up needing to use a cheat code to turn off encounters, because the crystal-ball enemy dots randomized to be way too aggressive and the encounter rate was insane, even if I was managing battles just fine.

It occurred to me to considered whether randomizing key items would make for a more interesting game. Basically, a setup where you get the Wind Rune with a fully-unlocked area list to start and then have to find the other 6 Runes hidden around the world. It might work? You’d probably have to scour dungeons but might not actually have to fight any of the bosses. The problem is that this game doesn’t really have a lot of the key-in-lock situations and certainly doesn’t have any chains of them. It’s really linear and involves very little backtracking, and certainly no backtracking to unlock things.

Soul Blazer [Randomized] (SNES, Played on Odin Pro) – Some of it might be me not being in the “zone” and some might be the particular enemies that spawn in this seed (and some is very likely that in my previous randomized run I got an early Super Bracelet), but I died a LOT in the early parts this seed. And I rarely, if ever, die in vanilla. Once I got the Zantetsu Sword and could grind some levels from the Leo’s Painting metal enemies almost everything was smooth sailing—I needed to do the dark floor of the Light Shrine without the Soul that lights it up (I had to pull up an online map); and I missed the VIP card in the Fire Shrine and had to check the spoiler log when I got stuck. But that’s almost everything honestly and still a fun run through.