And so it begins, my yearly foray into Final Fantasy during Chrismtas Vacation has officially begun and it feels like the perfect spot to start this blog!

This year I had the hankering to play blackbelts, my favorite class in the game. However, I've already done an all BB parfty so I decided to do something a little differnet. I decided to do a solo BB run. A lot of speed runners prefer to kill off their party right away, instead I am going the route of trying to keep them alive as long as possible, but when they die. They die and I'm down one for the rest of the game. I would like to not have to not go back to a save, but I imagine I'll have to and that's fine. To be kinda cheeky, I decided to name my characters after the primary Star Trek Captains.. KIRK, PCRD, SISK, and JANE.

We start, as one does, buying each character a wooden shirt and a set of nunchakus, and then proceed to get our quest from the king who informs us that his daughter was kidnapped by Garland and taken to a temple to the north.

With a normal party, I might head straight to the dungeon and save the princess, and even with an all bb party, I may be able to do it, though my chances of a death are fairly high. So to get started, I make the decision that we probably should get to level 3 at least before we take on Garland.

We spend our first level circling the castle and town and once we get a quick heal at the Inn, we head north to go grind a little more around the temple as there are bigger monsters up there, I figure we will be able to level a tad bit faster. This proves to be a bad idea however, as we run into a couple creeps and just like that, Kirk is dead. Much like the original show, he did not last long.

Not wanting to risk it again, we head back to the town area to get to level 3 with our remaining three black belts. But then I figure, it's probably a good idea to grind to level 4 now that we are a party of 3, so we take the extra time to get it, this time heading towards the temple again.

Fortunately, the return to the temple area does not prove problematic a second time, in fact, I'm often grateful for the presence of creeps and their excellent exp. Once to 4, we head into the temple and promptly defeat Garland. We could have probably stomped him even at 3, but better safe than sorry!

I save the princess, we get whisked back to the castle where I am rewarded with a magical lute, but told a greater evil has befallen the land and I must attain 4 orbs to return light to the world. To help me on my way, the king builds a bridge north of town for me to head east to clear out some pirates in a nearby town.

Normally, we may just head straight there, but again I want to play it safe and get to levedl 5 before we head across. There are a number of dangerous baddies along the way and I don't want to risk one of my captains getting murdered! So we head back to the temple and scour its depths to attain a cap, a cabin and a potion while getting a little xp along the way. We then hang around, rotating between inside and outside as health permits until we hit level 5.

At that point, we begin our trek across the bridge. We run into a small group of wolves and quickly they are dispatched... "This isn't going to be a problem!" I think to myself, and then run into an Iguana. The Iguana disagrees with me and does around 20-25 damage per hit, while we're doing less than 10! We thankfully escape and run back to town, exclaiming that we shall grind to 6 before we make the trip returning to the temple to gain the level as swiftly as we can.

I would say that the usual amount of time to defeat Garland and hit the bridge is about 30 minutes at most, it's not particularly difficult to do. But I don't normally grind here. At most I try to get to 3 before I head over the bridge, getting to 6 was quite a big task and took about 2 and a half hours! Unfortunately, the early game with just blackbelts is a pretty slow one as the goal is to essentially outlevel the area we are in.

And that is where we leave it for the first part of our journey. Today's XP totals are:

Runecrafting: 1; Aurum: 1; Dominus: 1; Glyphus: 1; Iteron: 1; Dracorius: 1