Stream Tonight to Finish Final Fantasy I!

I thought I would be able to finish Final Fantasy I on my usual Wednesday stream, but someone *cough*Milfy*cough* decided to pound the incentives so hard that I basically couldn’t do anything for a solid hour.

Related: I made a $200 donation to #ChangeKidsHealth because of a maxed out death tax.

Anyways, I got a window to stream and thus finish the game tonight so I’m going to take it. There’s a single dungeon left, plus, I’m going to pop and old easter egg in the game as well.

That means the next stream on Wednesday is the start of Final Fantasy II. More importantly, that means I need new donation incentives to encourage the virtual pain and hilarity.

Firstly, much like Final Fantasy I, you can name, or in this case, re-name, a character for $10. Final Fantasy II was the first game in the series to make the protagonists a part of the story, meaning I actually will have to say these names aloud over and over again instead of them just appearing on the stream.

The rename incentives are live on gamin4aven.com. Character limit for the names is 12 and you have until Wednesday to get them in!

But now for the really fun part, the incentives throughout the game. Let’s start with the two major milestones.

At $1,000, the Blood Sword is banned. Thanks to a very Office Space-like programming decision, the sword has a damage modifier of 1/16th of an enemy’s maximum HP instead of its current HP. With the additional physical attack modifiers on any attack, this makes every boss encounter hilariously trivial, including the final boss. In short, $1,000 raised from now until the end of the game turns off easy mode.

At $2,000, the Ultima spell is banned. This spell was originally, and hilariously, bugged. The programmer responsible for screwing it up, not only refused to fix it, he gave an all-time hilarious excuse as to why he wouldn’t fix it and then ciphered the code so it couldn’t be fixed. Ultima actually works as intended in this game, and it can indeed get extremely powerful, but $2,000 removes the ultimate Final Fantasy spell as an option.

Not yet a free subscriber? Make sure to do so to find out stream announcements, podcasts, and donation incentives before anyone else!

Now for the main fundraising gimmick. Every $25 raised will force a weapon change on a character, both randomized by a dice roll. Every $50 raised will force a character to discard a magic spell chosen by the dice, completely unlearning it (Ultima excluded).

The reason why both of these are potentially devastating is the way Final Fantasy II does its “leveling” system. There are no experience points in the game, making your characters stronger. Instead, individual stats, weapons, and magic spells are leveled up as they are used in battle.

Switching weapons means having to use something the character is not skilled in. Further, many weapons have severe magic penalties. So my powerful mage can easily find themselves crippled with the wrong weapon equipped.

Discarding a magic spell completely unlearns it. Plus, the tome item used to learn the spell is gone forever. While many spells can be bought in shops, some of the more powerful spells cannot. So not only am I looking at potentially having to relearn a useful spell from scratch, I could have a hard time even recovering the tome to learn it again.

This should keep things plenty spicy throughout the playthrough. Final Fantasy II is best played starting with very clear plans for each character. With these constant shifts, I will have to continuously adjust these strategies on the fly in order to progress through the game. Do I grind it out and risk more unforeseen changes? Or do I try to plow forward?

Either way, the death tax is reset to $0 starting Wednesday with a maximum of $200 through the end of the game.

Any donation made starting today, including character re-names, will count towards all incentives!