Final Fantasy Retrospective: Final Fantasy, Four White Mages Edition

 

“There aren’t enough white mages in your FF1 screenshot.” -Drew, May 5, 2021

Challenge accepted.

 

The Early Struggle

I didn’t expect the challenge to begin so soon, though. My first obstacle was discovered on the naming screen. With four White Mages, the easy part is choosing the jobs. It’s right there in the name of the challenge, four White Mages. The harder part came when I tried to convince Rusty to lend her name to one of the mages. I think she’s still a bit mad that enemies liked to kill the Black Mage a little too much in my original Retrospective run, but even if that wasn’t the case, White Mages can’t cast Fire spells, so she’s not interested.

She also asked me, “When are you going to finish Endwalker, Tyger?” I’ll get around to it!

Like in my original Retrospective article, I played using my preferred version, the one on the Game Boy Advance. Call it a crutch if you want, but I appreciated having MP instead of a very limited amount of spell charges. It can reduce the amount of back and forth between the field and the inn if characters have pools of MP to draw from instead of a limited number of spell charges, and it means you’re free to use magic if you need it.

Believe me when I say you will need a lot of magic to get through a four White Mage run.

After you get past the naming screen, the next challenge is that there simply isn’t enough money to go around. There’s only so much that the 500 gil you get on the Game Boy Advance can do. Weapons are cheap and the armour that White Mages already come with is the strongest they can equip at the start of the game, but magic is relatively expensive. I presume this may be because the cost of magic at the start of the game is balanced around players taking along a couple characters focused on melee and not four mages. On the plus side, there are spell tiers where taking four White Mages along means that players don’t have to choose which spell to leave behind, they just have to choose how many characters get to cast each particular spell. Some tiers have nothing but good spells, some tiers have a spell or two that are garbage. The first tier, for example, has a cure spell, a spell to hurt undead enemies, a spell to raise a characters defense and a spell to raise the caster’s evasion. All of these spells are good! It might be worth it to just make all four characters take the same spells here, choosing between higher defense and higher evasion for the Garland fight, since better versions of the defense spell can be bought later, as well as better versions of evasion spells. This also assumes that players grind for the money to outfit everyone with spells before fighting Garland. I say grind, but the amount of gil needed to finish buying level one spells can be won from just a few short battles against goblins.

This is the kind of decision I had to make, every time I found the next set of magic spells. Can I get away with buying three of each type, or should I shun one entirely, like I do in my ordinary runs of the game? What if I buy four of this spell and four of that spell, and then two each of the other two spells? Basically, are there some spells which are so valuable that I have to have them on every single character, and if all four spells are like that, can I live without one of them?

If you don’t choose to grind, then there is enough gil to outfit everyone with two spells right from the start, so a Cure spell and Protect spell are probably the best bets, with a single Dia spell in preparation for later, since there’s just enough gil left over for one. With all that out of the way, the Warriors of Light’s journey begins.

Getting those first levels really drives home how random the stat gains truly are in Final Fantasy. Everyone starts out with the same stats, but then after gaining just one level, one character has four more HP than another character, and there’s even a slight variant in MP. Overall, this won’t matter unless characters get incredibly unlucky and have incredibly low stat growth.

There are some undead enemies in the Chaos Shrine where Garland is holding the princess he kidnapped, but the party probably won’t stay for very long, so having only one character with Dia works well enough. There’s another dungeon later which requires a lot more Dia cast, so after defeating Garland, the money that he drops can go toward equipping the other three party members with the spell. Thus do they properly set off into the world (once the bridge has been rebuilt), hammers in hand and ready to go.

Here, by the way, is where the grind truly begins. The starting hammer is relatively weak compared to other weapons, and if the Garland fight is any indication, these four White Mages are going to need to deal chip damage against most enemies until better options come along much later in the game. Of course, a character will get stronger when gaining levels, and that includes their physical strength. Unless their name is Tellah.

Given the second boss fight is just a bunch of pirates without too much health or defense, its the perfect fight for a group of White Mages who can cast Protect on themselves. The bad news is that getting to Pravoka without grinding doesn’t give players enough gil to outfit the entire party with a full compliment of level two spells. That requires 3000 gil, and getting to Pravoka barely gives players a third of that total.

The Pravoka grind has nothing on the Elfheim grind, though. Two levels of spells plus armour upgrades means players will need a ton of gil when they get this far.

Of course, even with armour upgrades, some enemies hit like trucks, especially the Piscodemons guarding the Crown in the Marsh Cave. It’s possible to reload this fight until only two of them spawn, which is a much more manageable fight than when four of them spawn. On the plus side, they have less HP than some of the enemies faced in the dungeon thus far, so a group of White Mages doing chip damage with each hit will eventually bring them down, provided they’ve buffed themselves with extra defense and evasion first, with enough MP left over to cast Cura a few times as needed.

Of course, Astos is the real boss fight, the Piscodemons are just minions. And later on in the game, they become ordinary encounters, but I digress. Astos is possible to defeat, even though everyone still has ordinary Hammers at this point. Astos also has Slow, so anyone trying to grind is only gaining HP from their efforts, any additional attacks they gain will be nullified by Astos’s spells.

Slow is the word for this boss fight, but once the party finally defeats him, a chain of fetch quests are fulfilled and they also acquire the Mystic Key and can now enter any door. This means all the treasure rooms in every castle the party has visited are now open to them.

One big benefit to this for four White Mages is that all of the chests in Astos’s treasure room are guarded by enemies on a fixed encounter tile, like how the Crown is always being guarded by Piscodemons, even after you loot it. But unlike both the Piscodemons and Astos himself, all of the enemies that guard Astos’s treasures are undead and thus susceptible to the Dia spell. A couple applications of it and the entire group is dead. With enough MP, the party can arrive, gain a few levels and leave much stronger than before, especially since they should now be around the level where they will all be earning multiple physical attacks.

This is also around when a couple weapon upgrades can be found, allowing a couple White Mages to toss aside their pitiful hammers and wield stronger implements of destruction. You’d think that a hammer would do significant damage, especially if aimed at the head of your enemy, but I guess not. I mean, anyone who has a five year old they fail to supervise, at least one pet and a bunch of carpentry tools that have not been put away properly could tell you that hammers can indeed do significant damage to heads, and here these White Mages are, dealing scratch damage to various wildlife. I had no idea wolves are strong against hammers, but there you go.

Don’t go attacking wolves with hammers in real life, that would make me sad, the wolves mad, and you dead.

 

Managing The Challenge

The greatest benefit to finding that one grind spot in Astos’s Keep is that it’s incredibly fast (I gained at least a couple levels, usually three, per episode of anime), and everything afterwards feels much faster, too. No longer are the White Mages hitting for single digit damage, sometimes as low as one point of it. They’re regularly seeing double digits now and as a result, battles are a little faster to complete. Before finding the grind spot, I’d have to cast Protect and sometimes Invis on everyone in order to survive the stronger enemies, but after grinding for a bit, I stopped needing those spells in the short term. They’re still very handy later in the run, but it sure speeds things up to not have to cast them during grinding.

The next equipment shops only have weapons for the party’s physical fighters, so there’s not much I can do to augment my party’s power yet. I can augment their armour, though, but I need to save up the gil for that, so that’s my next objective. Back to the grind spot, and back to Crunchyroll! The mummies that spawn in two specific spots in Astos’s Keep drop a ton of money for this early in the game – clearly, they were buried with their wealth, and they had a lot of it – and they give decent experience, too.

Upgrading from the Copper Armlet to the Silver Armlet nearly triples everyone’s defense, which will be a huge help going forward, since the next challenge is to go after the Vampire and then the first of the elemental fiends.

I say “the next challenge”, but the Vampire is an undead enemy, which means the Dia spells work very well to defeat him on turn one. It’s probably the easiest boss in the entire four White Mage run. The next boss, the Lich, lasts longer than one turn, but is also easy to deal with using Dia spells.

I must also say that I very much appreciate not needing to backtrack through the entire dungeon after defeating the Lich, there’s a teleport at the very back of the boss room.

It isn’t until the party gets to Crescent Lake that they’re finally able to throw away the rest of their ordinary Hammers in favour of Mythril Hammers. Unfortunately, none of the armour available are fit for mages to wear, so they must go into the next dungeon, Mount Gulg, without any additional protection.

The best way to fight Marilith seems to be to stack Protect spells until her attacks do chip damage, cast Silence on her, and then give her the business. It’s a long fight, since the party is also only capable of chip damage against her, so having Crunchyroll still open is highly recommended. In the end, that’s two elemental fiends down, two to go.

Thankfully, the Gauntlets can be found in a treasure chest in the Citadel of Trials. White Mages can’t equip them, but they cast Thundara when used as an item in battle, and do not break. The Healing Staff is also available, working as a free cast of Heal. With free magic finally available, both healing and damage dealing, the party of White Mages will have a much easier time of things in the next boss fights, especially with so much MP left over, no longer having to cast so much healing magic as they go.

There’s one more dungeon left in the lower half of the world, one that awards the key item that gives players their airship. This dungeon is made much easier with the Gauntlets and Healing Staff. Once that’s complete, nearly everything in the north of the map can be completed as follows: the character with the strongest Intelligence uses the Gauntlets, the fastest character uses the Healing Staff, and the other two characters use physical hits until other such pieces of equipment can be found. Boss fights turn into buffing everyone’s defense until the bosses do little to no physical damage and then using the Healing Staff when necessary. Kraken is especially easy, what with the Gauntlets casting magic strong against water enemies.

What I find interesting about a White Mage run is that it highlights just how random stat growth is in the game. At the end of the game, my party’s Intelligence was all over the place, with my most intelligent character being leagues ahead of my least intelligent character. I also had a clear winner for strength, although my strongest character was also my least agile and therefore had the lowest accuracy and evasion. One character also received a substantial amount more HP than other characters, and one constantly rolled much lower for HP, although my lowest HP character was also my highest MP character. It just goes to show that even after writing a several thousand word retrospective on this game, there are still things I’m discovering about it.

With the Rat Tail from the Citadel of Trials and the airship from the desert to the south, the party can become White Wizards after talking to Bahamut, and thus are able to buy the Holy spell once they have enough gil to do so. Holy does cost a lot of MP, so when facing most trash enemies, spells like Thundara from the Gauntlets is going to have to suffice.

So that would seem to be it, then. Protection plus Holy plus using certain items as spells means the rest of the game goes by quickly, right? Well, first of all, there is that matter of grinding enough money to buy everyone’s last couple levels of spells. It’s not much of a grind, though. Players can earn enough money in the penultimate dungeon to finish buying their spells if they run out. But once that’s done, and all four fiends are defeated, there’s still the final boss. That’s right, it’s time to…

KILL CHAOS!

Unfortunately, there’s nothing interesting to say about the final dungeon. By this time, items that can cast every element in the game are in the party’s possession. Fira, Blizzara, Thundara and Diara, all of which can be used depending on the situation. The four elemental fiends are present in stronger forms in the final dungeon, but are still easily dispatched thanks to buffing everyone’s defense several times and then spamming Holy. I bought a ton of Ether before entering the dungeon, but didn’t use any MP outside of the boss fights, so I didn’t run out until after the fourth elemental fiend was destroyed for the second time. Even then, I still had some MP left but not enough for another boss fight, so the only time I actually had to use any Ether was right before the final boss.

In the final dungeon is a sword called Masamune, which is somehow able to be equipped by both a White Mage and a White Wizard. This is probably the most interesting thing I can report about the final leg of the run. Random battles are basically being handled by items that cast Fira, Blizzara, and so on, and boss fights are being handled by protection and Holy spells.

For variety, against Chaos I used the Giant’s Gloves to cast Saber several times on the White Mage I gave the Masamune to, then had him attack physically while everyone else used Holy. The fight was a bit on the long side, and Chaos cast Curaja once, putting his HP back up to full, but eventually, Chaos was beaten, the time loop severed, and peace restored to the world.

 

In Conclusion

For the last several hours of the White Mage challenge run, I was generally using Black Mage spells to deal damage, so it really feels like it turned into a Black Mage run, if not for my access to cure spells and the occasional group of undead enemies I could cast Dia on. My MP consumption was reduced to almost nothing, outside of boss battles. I kind of feel like items such as the Gauntlets were included in the game mainly because they could facilitate challenge runs like these.

“Hey, what if the player wanted to take four White Mages through the game? There aren’t a lot of enemy groups they’ll be able to reliably damage later on.”

“Well, we could put black magic on a few items. Nothing too powerful, though, or no one will take any Black Mages.”

“But what if the player doesn’t have any White or Red Mages? Maybe they have a party of Fighters.”

“Okay, we’ll add Heal to a couple items.”

“Hang on, the final dungeon is a little overtuned for that White Mage run. Holy isn’t doing quite enough damage to Chaos. Should we buff the spell a bit?”

“Nah, we’ll just put Saber on an item and program in a weapon that everyone can equip. We’ll also not have Chaos cancel everyone’s buffs. We’re going to such a great length to make sure the player has them, it would defeat the purpose entirely.”

Black magic is such a major part of the second half of the White Mage challenge run that I pretty much feel like I should’ve just chosen a party of Black Mages and run with them instead.

So that’s exactly what I did.