So diving back into the earth cave, I made a bad turn and end up in a treasure room! Gross, items of monetary value! I hate these. Since I'm here I figure I'll open a chest, but the fixed encounter before it is surprisingly out of depth for the earth cave: two sphinxes. Manage to take them out but as you can see poor kit has taken quite a beating and nearly dies. I open the chest for some gold, but decide I'd rather leave the room without bothering with any other chests.
It's Lich time! Fun fact, in the Japanese version the 4 main bosses were called the 4 chaoses, not fiends. But it was considered confusing since the last boss is also named chaos.
Lich has more than enough defense to prevent me from one rounding him at this level, but with our now pretty high critical rate (~15%) and 4 attacks a round, you usually land a crit or two and that punches through his armor. It can be funny when you land 0 crits, you'll usually see something like "4 hits! 5 damage." Wow, we're making progress!
Next up is Crescent lake! Sail south around the earth cave and then west, to this port. Technically you're now on the eastern edge of the world, since you looped around the world map.
Restocking on potions is important. I felt like I spend enough of my game time on this screen that you should too. I actually went pretty overboard buying 50 houses and then when I later on wanted to buy proRings, actually had to farm some gold. I am a shame to black belts everywhere.
I generally don't bother talking to storyline NPC's, but this one hands you the canoe if you've defeated lich, so now we can travel through rivers. Circle of 12 wise men, yada yada.
River action shots! Hydras in rivers can hit pretty hard, but aside from that and some annoying poison monsters, most things here aren't a threat and give decent exp/gold. There isn't much need to level up right now though. Instead I head north of the port to crescent lake, and take the port/river to the ice cave!
I assume this is an unintentional bug but you can disembark the boat into rivers once you have the canoe. This can be used to get closer to the castle of ordeals than is possible by landing the airship, if you don't mind sailing all the way up there. I didn't bother to do that this game, I just flew there.
I'd say I'm technically fighting underleveled here; I think the intention is that you do the volcano before getting the airship, but most people familiar with the game tend to do it in reverse order. In any case, frost dragons are pretty scary for level 15-16 characters, but our heavy offense will take care of business. Black belts for life!
The room with the floater ironically is full of shaft traps! This is the first time I entered the room, so you have to take a shaft trap down to the bottom level, you'll then travel back up to the top floor, fall in another shaft, and then land inside of all the shaft traps, where you can get the floater.
The first picture here shows the first "damage tile" we ran into. These deal 1 damage to each character, but you can't encounter monsters on them, so they can sometimes be a benefit to you. Also they can't deal the final damage point, I think - maybe I should double check that. After this though, we ran into some trouble - a party of mages. Mages here have Rub just like Astos (They even have the same sprite, just recolored) and one lands it on our beloved Chei. Man, Chei is just always taking one for the team. Such a team player, Chei was also the one who took Astos' rub. Definitely the one true god. Kit gets turned to stone later on fighting cockatrices, although I have plenty of soft potions to cure that. Sadly, there is no way to revive a character outside of a town unless you have a white mage, which I clearly don't. I don't think red mages can learn life, but maybe they can, I didn't check. Life doesn't work during combat, so there's never any way to revive in battle.
So the three of us remaining make it to the boss, Eye. Eye can also do instant death attacks: Rub, stone, and XXXX. Fortunately that doesn't happen and it dies rather quickly. Eye only has 162 hp - it's a popular leveling spot once you get proRings/ribbons so that you are immune (some guides just say resistant; not sure if I've ever seen a death attack work on a proRing/Ribbon user, though) to instant death attacks. Gives ~750 exp, can't hit for much damage, very quick fixed fight.
Here's a brief reminder that black belts are above such mundane things as weapons and armor - I've never used either all game long. That will change soon as I like being immune to status effects, but you never need armor for actual defense. You can skip all treasure rooms in the game except for the ribbon locations and save yourself a lot of hassle
Now that we have the floater, head south of crescent lake and raise the airship!
What, the earth cave? Hey, don't look at me funny, it's a good leveling spot without prorings yet, so I fought some more earths, then headed over to the volcano the quick way. No more canoeing for me.
We've done a lot of things, but we're still only 17, two more levels than when I fought Lich (entered the earth cave at 14 but leveled up when inside).
One of my favorite floors of any dungeon in the game - there's a huge twisting room north of me filled with treasure. There's a narrow hallway along the south side, all you have to do to get to the next floor is go west. Skips so much. <3 fists.
Still have to fight some things, of course, so here's some action shots. R gargoyles can cast fire spells, which hurt pretty bad. We can't cast Afire, but blackbelts do have the highest magic defense of any class, so that helps.
Final floor of the volcano, we don't need any of the loot (and only a few directions actually have any loot), so we just head southwest to kary.
Kary, like Lich, has plenty of armor and a lot of our individual hits won't do much damage. Again, crits will help pierce through armor, doing 60-70 damage for a typical attack. Kary has 600 hp, and falls pretty easily. Chei takes a lot of damage but I ignore damage and do nothing but punch all the way through, and Chei lives with 16 hp. I think she was considering taking another one for the team, though.
Two orbs are now shining, two to go. I head up to the cave of ordeals because why not, it's a cool castle. Lots of teleporters form a maze inside, and it's been too long and I don't feel like going the wrong way, so I looked up which were the correct ones. The maze isn't terribly long in any case. Since I flew up to the castle, you have to land a fair bit away and fight though some higher level monsters:
The catman sprite is supposed to look like its leaping out of the screen towards you, with its legs showing slightly under it. But to me it always just looked like it was a bust of a human, with no body. Entered the castle, I don't know who would ever come here without the crown, and up we go. MudGol and nitemares are both fixed encounters and could be used for leveling if you want, but no real need, because there's an even better one up ahead.
The way the chest is positioned you'll probably pick up the treasure before you fight the boss, and now we have the rat's tail! Simply called tail due to item name length restrictions, in later FF's it's called rat tail, so I assume this one is too. No finer trophy of bravery could ever exist.
Boss to the castle of ordeals is 1-2 zombie dragons. I only got one and turned it into fine dust rather quickly, but as I hinted at before, this is the better leveling spot in the castle, so I fought more groups of zombie dragons several times for the experience. I didn't keep exact track but I should be roughly level 21 by now. In any case I have a screenshot of my level 21 status:
This is another one of those critical levels: you now attack 6 times. The way you can tell is it's an extra 2 attacks every 32 hit % (other classes get one attack at the same 32% hit), and we now have 65. There's no variation in hit % gains, it's fixed by class.
Awwww yeah, feel the power. Anyways, fly up to the northwest continent, buy the bottle from the caravan (not pictured), then fly up to the north east mountain town of gaia (pictured), where you can release the fairy from the bottle to get oxyale (I hope you can tell the last picture is a fairy).
Sadly, at this point, it's time to sully my pure blackbelts with a piece of armor: Gaia sells prorings for protection from death. As I mentioned before I went overboard on buying houses and had to farm some gold, but did so and bought 4 proRings.
The first screenshot is level 23 before proRing, then I equip the proring and lose my absorb and 1 evasion. You lose all "skin" absorb, but the ring provides 8 itself. I then have to level up to 24, where I get my 24 absorb back, am still immune to death effects, and still have the -1 evasion. With oxyale and proRings, we're now set for the temple of onrac (water dungeon). To be continued...