Final Fantasy: Lost in Japanese

We got to the cursed town last night, only to find that the Jinn apparently turned the townspeople into these cool-looking hollow gingerbread people (By the way, let’s have a big hand for our yummy gingerbread cookie model, Ginger!). Understandably, being a gingerbread cookie is only cool if it happens to someone else, and the townsfolk would like to return to normal. It’s our job to help them.

As I’m finding is usually the case with Final Fantasy games, nothing is simple, and Final Fantasy III looks to be no exception. So hang on, because this is what I’ve figured out so far…

Only mithril will work to bottle up the Jinn in their cave again, so we need mithril weapons. This means we need mithril, which is in a mine to the south of town. Naturally we went there, but we got wiped out in combat so fast that I knew we were in the wrong place. Enter our good buddy Cid, from Final Fantasy II, who was hanging around the local inn. Seems the Jinn turned him into a gingerbread outline, too. He tells us that he’ll let us use his flying ship, which is in a desert to the west. I’m not sure how this was supposed to help us, but whenever I ask him to explain things again, he just barks at us to go get the flying ship. Ok, ok, we get the hint.

At some point, someone clued us into the fact that it’s not mithril weapons, but a mithril ring that we need, and when we get to Cid’s ship, we find the daughter of the local blacksmith, who tells us that she can’t make a mithril ring. Dead end?

No! Apparently there is another mithril ring that was given to the king, whose castle lies to the west. Zoom, we go flying to visit him. Lo and behold, everyone here has also become gingerbread cookie outlines as well. The gingerbread king tells us his daughter has the ring, but she was captured by the Jinn—or undead, I forgot which—and taken to a cave to the north.

Whew, so complicated! I’m tired just from writing that, forget about figuring it all out in Japanese. Do keep in mind that half of this is probably wrong, as I got a bit confused by some of the language, and the gingerbread folk weren’t the clearest speakers. Who knows, maybe I’m supposed to be eating all the gingerbread people.

If that’s not enough excitement, along the way our party swelled to four members with the addition of various castoffs and aspiring heroes, and we also learned of a powerful sword that lies in the west tower of the king’s castle. We’ll pick up our story with an attempt to get that sword tomorrow.

Onward!