PS2

Fifty-four hours.

Things are coming closer to a close, I believe.

Not there yet, though.

I must say, the story is a lot more compelling and a lot more, well, more like a story than at the beginning of the game.

Only one boss this evening. He didn’t seem to difficult, but with a few more points of damage from him on a couple of occassions it could have been different. And it took a while, because he had a lot of hit points. I really didn’t make my early game choices too well, so things are more difficult for me than they should be, I think, but not enough to really annoy me. I think that generally the balancing in this game is really very, very good. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had some sort of adaptive difficulty built in. It would explain why the boss fight strategies I checked online didn’t work for me and why everything seems to be just hard enough. Either that or my play style – explore everywhere but don’t specifically stay anywhere to level up – is the expected method of going through the game.

Fifty hours now.

No, still not done. Not by a long way, I don’t think.

I got to a boss who slaughtered me in about six turns. Ouch. I assumed it was a battle I was meant to lose, you know, they happen in RPGs now and again. But it wasn’t. Somehow I was meant to win it. So I went back. And lasted quite a long time, but half of that was me hanging on hoping for a miracle while half my party lay dead.

So I decided to look on GameFAQs for boss tips. Before I got that far, though, the section headings made it obvious that I’d missed out a huge chunk of the game.

A-ha! That’ll give me an item I need to deal with this uber-boss!

That’s what I thought.

I was wrong. I checked the first sentence or two of the section I missed, which got me started, but I didn’t really get anything for doing it. Just a sub-quest, I suppose. I wonder if I’ve missed many of those?

I’ve gone up a level now, though, so maybe I’ll be able to cope with the boss now. Maybe. I don’t know, though. It had incredibly powerful attacks.

Hmm. I didn’t think this worked off the hard drive, but someone on a forum said it did, so I copied it and it does. Hooray for even shorter load times! Putting the disc back in its case I found the FFXII demo, which I’d completely forgotten about. I’ll have to try that sometime.

Anyway, another five hours. Started off with a boss fight that went on ages but which wasn’t too stressful. Lots of wandering around and exploring. I did one dungeon and then got to another one, but it was proving a little tricky and my resources were dwindling, so I used Evac to get out and then used Zoom to get back to Farebury, because I’m a cheapskate and it’s got the cheapest inn. I’ll try the dungeon again tomorrow. I got to a bit where I couldn’t progress and so would have to backtrack to try and find a switch or lever or cutscene or something to let me go on.

I did die once this evening, actually. Just out in the field. Wasn’t my fault. Some enemies have a spell that goes through your entire party and has a small chance of killing anyone it touches. I’m not sure what the odds are of it wiping out your entire party in one sweep, but I bet it’s high. Not high enough to stop it happening to me, though. I lost about 3,000 gold because of that, too. It’s not like I’ve ever got much cash, because I never sell anything. You never know what you might need. And I can never remember which items are greyed out when using the alchemy pot. Anyway, I did buy Yangus his first new weapon in about thirty hours this evening, so that was nice.

So I made my way back to the boss. Luckily, the dungeon before him hadn’t reset, so it was pretty easy to get back to him. A tough fight, but I defeated him. And then, as is the way of these things, he transformed into a different form and splatted back to church. So I decided to try one more time to kill him. As luck would have it, he doesn’t reset back to his earlier form so I only had the second form to deal with.

I checked the boss tips on GameFAQs, which scared me. I hadn’t set myself up properly, didn’t have any of the recommended attacks or weapons and thought I was going to die. I nearly did, too.

We were twenty or thirty turns in. My main healer was on the floor dead and my secondary healer was near death and running out of magic, fast. He could have died that turn but the boss chose another target. And after the boss’s turn it was my turn. A fireball in his face and then a huge scythe chop and… down he went! I couldn’t believe it.

Far easier than GameFAQs had led me to believe… though I could have died had things been slightly different. I guess I was a bit lucky.

Anyway, after he was defeated the game got back to normal… more or less. Harder now, for reasons I won’t go into, and darker than it’s been previously. Things are getting serious.

Thirty-seven hours in and still a lot to do.