Once you’re done in town you’re going to have to go out into the world (sadly there is no NPC mode, where you set up a shop and sell mercantile items while never leaving town, in FFR). You have a job to do: find your path to the end boss, by whatever means the randomized game has given you. This means that the first thing you’re going to see (unless you’re in a seed where your encounters are turned off) is enemies.
¶ The Basics of Encounters
Combat is a standard part of the RPG experience. You wander out into the world, enemies arrive, you do battle, and then (assuming you win the battle) experience points (EXP) are awarded. Over time, fighting enemies, you will level up, becoming stronger and better able to handle more serious threats as they come your way. This is the standard “loop” of the game, and will occur at every phase as you progress.
FFR’s encounters stick to the standard rules of the vanilla Final Fantasy experience. In that game, there was a set number of encounters, along a set procession, and as you moved through the game you’d see certain enemy groups at certain times, all along a 256 step path (because, in all NES games, 0-255 was a standard mathematical progression). This enemy group progression, which is fixed in the game, would proceed along every encounter zone of the game.
Final Fantasy’s world map is broken up into an 8x8 grid of zones, with each of those zones consisting of a 32x32 set of tiles. When you move across that 32x32 zone into a new zone, the enemy encounter groups will change (that doesn’t always mean they’ll get harder, but what enemies can show up, and where, and how will change between zones). Each zone has eight different packs of enemies that can appear, and no two zones are exactly the same. This, combined with the set progression of when encounters show up, can lead to the game feeling “randomized” with its encounters, but that is actually an illusion. Vanilla Final Fantasy had a very set, rigid way of handling its encounters, and players were stuck on that path whether they realized it or not.
FFR maintains the rigid structure of vanilla Final Fantasy’s encounter system, but, because it’s a randomizer, things get shuffled up. When encounters happen along that 256-step line will be shuffled, and what types of encounters happen when will also be shuffled. So, for instance, once you’re booted into the game and wandering the world, you might get your first encounter five steps from safety, or it might be ten. But the trick is, when you first set off, it will always be the same number of steps each time. The game is fixed.
¶ Manipulating Encounters
Even though the encounter progression is fixed, though, the player still has some control over the process. This is due to the fact that the Nintendo Entertainment System had two types of resets – Hard (via the Power button) and Soft (via the Reset button) – and Final Fantasy (and thus FFR) reads each of those resets differently. A Soft Reset would maintain the active memory of the game, keeping your progression through the encounter path saved while a Hard Reset will clear the active memory, putting your encounter progression back at step zero.
Why is this important? Well, go back to what was just said about how, on your first venture out into the world, you might get an encounter five steps out, but a different seed could be ten steps out. When you Hard Reset, you go back to that first encounter and now you know when it will be. Meanwhile, if you soft reset you then skip that encounter when it comes up and you can progress deeper into the encounter table moving beyond that fight. The whole progression of the table works this way, certain fights at certain times, and by using the Hard and Soft Resets you can manipulate your way through the encounter table, learning how to skip past fights you may not want in order to get a more desirable path through the game.
We recognize that’s a lot of jargon without an easy way to process it, so here’s a visual trick that we’ve found works. Imagine the whole of the encounter table is a deck of cards. That deck is 256 cards big (because there’s 256 steps in the encounter table) and has eight different suits (because there are eight possible fights in any encounter zone). FFR shuffles that deck when your seed is first rolled and then, as you progress through the game, those cards are dealt, one at a time for each step taken. On certain cards (maybe the Queens and up in this theoretical deck) an encounter happens. Which encounter you get depends on the suit, but they will always occur on these cards. If you Hard Reset, the game takes that deck, neatly stacks it back up (no shuffling again, just the same stack in the same order), and starts dealing out, one at a time again, from the start of the deck. If, however, you’re on an encounter and you Soft Reset, you’re taken back to where you last saved but the deck isn’t stacked back up. Wherever you were in that deck is where you start, and you continue progressing through. When you reach the end of the deck, the game neatly stacks it up again, and continues you onwards, over and over.
(Okay, this last part is a tad disingenuous as, in reality, the game goes through the deck forward twice, and then backwards once, forwards once, backwards twice, and on in this weird, snake-like loop. But if you’re using Hard and Soft resets you likely won’t see this full progression too often in your runs.)
Note that there are technically three encounter types – overworld, sea, and dungeon – and that the overworld and dungeons can be scaled differently. However, we’ll discuss scaling of the game much later in the book, so it’s best just to think of the easy “deck of cards” analogy for now while you’re still learning.
Learning how to manipulate the encounter table is an important part of playing FFR. If there’s a nice, long run early in the encounter table, you can use a Hard Reset to get to that run, over and over, saving between each “hero run” (a term we use for a long run without encounters) to “scum” your way across the overworld. If there’s a particularly bad fight in a dungeon, you can use Soft Resets early to try and avoid that later encounter. If there’s a fight very early in the encounter table you could find a high-level, end-game zone and take those fights, over and over, by saving and Hard Resetting in that zone. This is important tech, so we encourage you to learn how to use the encounter table to your advantage to get through the game efficiently.
- An Even More Detailed Discussion of the Encounter Table
- Discussion of the Encounter Table During a Duck Bootcamp Vod Review (YouTube)
¶ Battling Enemies
Enemies are unavoidable in standard FFR play. You will find fights and you will get into battles. What you do in those fights, though, is key. Final Fantasy has two kinds of battles, runnable and unrunnable, and of the two you only “have to” take the unrunnable kind. That’s because, of course, since you can’t run from those fights the game forces you into them (although, note, that is only true when you’re deep into a dungeon as, on the overworld and very early in dungeons, you can simply Soft Reset past these encounters if you so chose). This is why we had you check your equipment and buy spells in the last chapter: if you’re in a dungeon and you’re in a fight you have to take (be it an unrunnable encounter or possibly a boss) you’ll need to be ready to handle that fight.
So, what do you do? Well, most of the time, you run. When encounters are runnable the most efficient thing to do is run away from them. That might seem counterintuitive to the whole process of playing an RPG (where the goal is, we thought, to kill things and get stronger) but most basic mobs in the game aren’t really worth that much experience. Sure, taking a couple here or there is fine if you need a quick shot of experience (maybe to get just strong enough to tackle some harder areas), but there’s a law of diminishing returns. The more you fight lower-level mobs, the less valuable they’ll become in the long run. Avoiding fights is faster, and more efficient, than taking everything you see.
There are some instances, though, where this isn’t the case. It’s possible that an enemy could have a spell or skill that can flatten your party. Arguably the best outcome is that you can reset past or run from these encounters. But if you can’t (because they’re unrunnable or they cast the spell quickly, or you just can’t take the chance) that’s where your magic comes in. We suggested certain spells to pick up, things you will want for enemy management, and you want to have your charges ready in these instances. Be prepared and take only the fights you have to, when you have to, as you progress through the game.
There is one more twist, of course, in this process: enemies can have their skills, spells, and effects shuffled. By default in the randomizer, what an enemy can do is shuffled around among all the packs. That can lead to, in some instances, Imps with NUKE or spiders with THUNDER (which we affectionately call “Dani Spiders” after our admin who always seems to roll the most dangerous spiders ever seen). It is always a good idea to keep an eye out for what the enemies can do so you can recognize when to avoid them, especially if you’re trying to find an enemy that’s worth taking for experience. Although note that grinding for experience is something we’ll cover in a later chapter
- Info on Monsters (Game Corner)
- Vanilla Enemies, Types, and Weaknesses
- Enemy Skill and Spell Script Pool
- Enemy Touch Effects Guide [YouTube] (Contributed by Zeno)
- Monster Formation FAQ (GameFaqs)
One more thing to note is that the party’s position in battle dictates how likely they are to be attacked. By using the Select button on the overworld and in dungeons you can rearrange your party, moving them around in a vertical line. That line dictates their relative place in front of and behind each other. Enemies are more likely to attack the character at the front of the party (the top) than the back (the bottom):
- Top slot will be targeted 50% of the time.
- Second slot (middle-top) will be targeted 25% of the time.
- Third slot (middle-bottom) will be targeted very-slightly less than 12.5% of the time.
- Fourth slot (bottom) will be targeted just a hair more than 12.5% of the time.
Additionally, when a character is downed, their slot becomes an invalid spot for enemy attacks. Instead of simply moving the attack to the next person in line, the game will reroll the entire attack, making it more likely that the top slot will see the attack. This is useful when trying to protect your weaker party members during a dive as you can put a dead character in the second slot, have a meat shield in the first slot, and your other characters (likely your mages) will avoid more attacks that way.
And no, enemies don’t “fail” their attacks when they target a downed hero. While the player’s party has to choose their attacks at the start of the round, and are committed to attacking an enemy even if they are downed (wasting those attacks), enemies aren’t limited in the same way. Their targets are chosen when their turn comes up in the battle order, so if a character is downed, the enemy gets to make a new choice. It’s not exactly fair, but then few NES games of the era were.
One more thing to note is that the top slot also determines your surprise and ambush rate. This is a factor of the character’s luck, so you’ll want a character (like the thief) up in that first slot to avoid sitting through entire rounds of combat where the enemies attack first and get to do whatever you want while you’re at their mercy.
¶ Advanced Concepts
¶ Crit Loops
While we’re talking about positioning of your party, we should also take a small moment to mention the RNG table for battles. RNG (aka, the Random Number Generator) isn’t really “random” in Final Fantasy. The game would have a populated table of numbers and it would run down that table based on time in battle, choices made, what the heroes and enemies do and when, etc., but because it’s based on a table, and the game reuses that table over and over in fights, it’s not really random (but then there’s nothing in the game mechanics that’s truly random). This means that you will likely see some party slots get hit more than others, some actions get taken by enemies more often than others, and this is all down to the RNG table.
This can also be used to your advantage, though. Ideally, in boss fights, you have a character in the third slot (although sometimes the fourth slot is the magic one) that can get fully defended (with RUSE or INVS) and cannot be punched. They would be the last person standing, and you can hold A (and pray, as we say). Then you watch and there’s a good chance (although never guaranteed) that you fight, hit the boss, they fight, miss you, and then then game gets stuck in a loop and you fight again (for the same damage), the boss fights (for the same miss), and then again… and again… and again.
You’re in what we call a “crit loop” (because, more often than not, your character crits when they do their attack in this loop) and you sit there, button held, while the game plays itself over and over until the boss dies. Again, this isn’t always guaranteed to work (and sometimes you can get a bad crit loop where the boss crits you and you miss) but it’s a strategy to keep in mind, especially for Chaos. Third slot can be magic sometimes.
¶ Enemizer
If you want to go beyond the standard enemies and simply seeing their basic attacks shuffled around, you can look into the two different flavors of Enemizer. The first flag, Generate New Formations, will create entirely new, and different packs, of enemies from the vanilla game. As an example, standard packs of creatures on the open sea will include Sahags, R.Sahags, Sharks, OddEyes, and Kyzokus. But with Generate New Formations on, you could find packs of Wolves/Sahags, Scorpions/Kyzokus, MadPonies/Sharks, and more. Enemizer will try to create new packs of enemies from similar levels and strengths, just in formations not originally seen in the vanilla game.
And then there’s Generate New Enemies. As the name implies, this format for Enemizer throws out all the old enemies and makes all kinds of new ones. The first zone, for example, could have H.Crabs, M.Mechs, and T.Ponies, all of which are new and never appeared in the original game (even as FFR uses recolored sprites to make these new enemies). Their stats, abilities, and functions will all be scaled to the zone you’re in (so an early M.Mech, despite looking like a late-game enemy, will still be the equivalent of an early-game Imp) but they won’t be anything you’ve likely seen before.
Enemizer is fun, but it can shift the balance of the game some. Get practice with the base randomizer before turning on this feature and seeing everything it can do.