Blue Magic, also referred to as Enemy Skill or Lores, is a skillset consisting of abilities used by monsters. Most of the time, a character who can use it is known as a Blue Mage.

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It was first introduced in Final Fantasy V and has since reappeared in most games from the series since then. The most common way of obtaining those skills or spells is to have the blue mage get attacked by the spell and survive it. There have been other variants, but they all require the player to fight the enemy with the wanted skill.

Why do I hate it?

Blue Magic is a pain to build, if you want to have a decent blue mage, you’ll have to spend a ton of time hunting enemies and grinding until the enemy finally decides to use the spell, then hope it hits your blue mage (if that’s the way to learn it in that particular game) and hope that the character survives. Of course, the best spells are usually the hardest to learn, some of them are friendly spells, making it unlikely the enemy will use it against you (you’ll have to either control the monster or use a reflective barrier on the enemy and hope the reflection hits your mage). Other spells will obliterate your character or even your party, forcing you to make use of some auto-life ability.

Fortunately, learning blue magic has always been optional, it just annoys me that in most games, there will often be one class or character that won’t be of much use because I can’t bring myself to grind the spells.

Famous blue mages

In Final Fantasy V, any character could be a blue mage, but in other games, a specific character usually has the ability.

Strago in Final Fantasy VI was able to learn spells simply by seeing them being used in battle, making it a bit easier and faster. Furthermore, Relm could take control of monsters to force them to use certain skills. Gau could also be considered as some sort of blue mage since his ability was to mimic monsters.

Quistis in VIII could learn blue magic by using items dropped by the enemies. Quina in IX had to eat the enemies and could only use the spells as a limit break. Finally, Kimahri in X simply had to use his Lancet ability on an enemy to learn a skill, much simpler.

Final Fantasy II and III

These are the most known examples of this strategy. The Final Fantasy II and III games as we know them in North America are actually the 4th and 6th installments in the series. Square had no plans to release the games between the first game and FFIV so they whacked the number so that consumers wouldn’t be confused. Fortunately, they rectified the numbering with Final Fantasy VII, but that left people wondering where Final Fantasy IV through VI had gone until fans learned that FFII (us) meant FFIV (jp) and FFIII (us) meant FFVI (jp).

Final Fantasy Adventure

A lesser known title, Final Fantasy Adventure, is actually the first game in the Mana series. The game was re-released by Square Enix with a name closer to its original name as “Sword of Mana” on the Gameboy Advance. Just to make things still more confusing, the game was named “Mystic Quest” in Europe. Even though the game is a sort of Zelda-esque spin-off of Final Fantasy, it shares only the basic RPG elements with the main series.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

While we’re on the subject of Mystic Quest, since Square had burned the name in Europe, it had to be released as “Mystic Quest Legend” over there.

Final Fantasy Legend

The Final Fantasy Legend games have nothing to do with Final Fantasy, they are actually the first games of the SaGa series. Their names were completely changed for marketing purposes.

Final Fantasy XI and XIV

Two more recent examples of Square, actually Squaresoft and Square Enix, messing up with names are the two online games, Final Fantasy XI and XIV. The games were not actually renamed, but their inclusion as games of the main series can hardly be seen as anything else than a marketing tactic to improve the sales of the game. Up until FFXI, all games had shared the same concepts: a single player RPG game where a party of characters embark on an epic quest to save the world from evil. FFXI threw all of this away. Why not name the game “Final Fantasy Online”, or “Final Fantasy World”, or “Gaia”?

The boy was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games. He first learned about it when the first Final Fantasy came to America. He was too young at the time to know what it was about but his father seemed to enjoy it. He heard about Final Fantasy again when Final Fantasy II (now IV) appeared on his Super Nintendo. He was still quite young to be able to play but he could understand what was going on. Then came Final Fantasy III (VI) which was a gift from his father to his mother (obviously a joke). He was now old enough to play, but he was too shy to take the controller from his older brother’s hands. Instead they played together, the little boy would observer and advise his brother. He had a fantastic memory and everything that happened on screen was embedded forever in a part of his brain. This would help him play the game himself once he would dare try the game.

A year or two passed, he now had enough confidence to try the games he only saw others play. He first played Final Fantasy III, then II. He played a bit of FFI but it was too hard for him. His parents even bought Final Fantasy Mystic Quest which he enjoyed even though it was not really like the other games. As the time passed, he learned to love those games and the consoles they were made for. He was not only a Final Fantasy fanboy, he was also a Nintendo fan. He made his parents buy the Nintendo 64 along with the excellent Super Mario 64. Then Squaresoft decided to leave Nintendo (rather, Nintendo decided to use cartridges that could contain a tiny fraction of what CDs could). The boy followed Squaresoft and sold a bunch of old games for the privilege of playing the newest Final Fantasy game.

A seasoned fanboy

In the following years the boy would play everything related to Final Fantasy. When he couldn’t find the original game he would find the ROM. He played and replayed the classics he had learned to love in his youth, he learned the correct numbering of the SNES games, he played the real Final Fantasy II and III. He played Final Fantasy V and bought all the remakes (Final Fantasy Origins, Chronicles, Anthology, Dawn of Souls). He tried Final Fantasy Adventure (which turned out to be a marketing name since it was really a Mana game) and the Final Fantasy Legend games. Even when a game was not really fun, he forced himself to play it just to know more about the fantastic universe of Final Fantasy.

He played everything.

The enlightenment

He loved the series so much that he spent a lot of time in forums discussing the games (released and announced). He learned about all the re-releases of his games, how plenty of games were first released in Japan, then in North America then re-released in Japan with just enough additional content to make plenty of fans buy the games again (and make the North Americans envy them). He learned about the shady marketing tactics the company had used to sell games. They used the Final Fantasy name to boost sales of other series.

One day they announced what fans everywhere were hoping for since the release of Final Fantasy VII: more Final Fantasy VII. They announced a mobile phone game, a movie and a spin-off game based on a character from the original game.

It was really that one game that put the last nail in the coffin. The game didn’t appeal to the boy (who had become an adult) at all and the reviews didn’t help either. The low scores confirmed the boy’s suspicions: SquareEnix could make a bad game. The fanboy in him had died. He was still very much a fan of the series, but he no longer bought games just because of a name stamped on it.

The reason behind this has to do with the way the data is stored in memory. Computers only understand binary numbers so every number or word of anything used to communicate with a computer is encoded in binary, each binary value is represented by a bit. The bit can either be 1 or 0.

Here’s how bits represent values:

0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0100 = 4
1000 = 8
1011 = 11
...

Since only one bit doesn’t give much information, bits were grouped together to make a wider array of values available. This group was named a byte. Typically, one byte is a group of 8 bits. Every information transmitted to and from the computer or console is transmitted using this byte format. Nowadays, computers send multiple bytes at the same time to improve the efficiency of communications, a 64 bit computer transmits information using 8 bytes (8 * 8 bits = 64 bits) at the time.

Now let’s take a look at the range of values one byte gives us:

1000 0000 = 128
1111 1111 = 255

As you can see, 255 represents the biggest value that can be represented by a single byte and that’s why Final Fantasy (and other games) have used this value as the limit for stats. Nowadays, most information is stored using at least 32 bits at the time so we could technically use values up to slightly less than 4.3 billion, but that wouldn’t be so practical.

First of all, coming from E3:

Final Fantasy XIV

• FFXIV is the sequel to FFXI in the sense that it is a MMO
• They currently want to make it a global game, meaning no separate servers depending on the region: Japanese players will be able to play with American players
• They are aiming for a release in 2010

Final Fantasy XIII

• Summons are once again a central part of the story. Characters will be attached to one summon (not selectable by players). It is not known if more than one summon will be attached to characters or if all characters will have a summon (or more). The attached summons seem to be fixed by the story.

Final Fantasy VII

• It’s a direct port of the PlayStation game.
• It costs 9.99 US$
• Available for download now (1.32GB required)

And finally, news coming from Nintendo:

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

• The sequel to the excellent Final Fantasy IV (also known as Final Fantasy II in North America)
• Released on WiiWare at the beginning of the week
• Contains all the episodes (9) from the cellular game from Japan
• Costs 800 Wii points

Sony has just announced that Final Fantasy VII will be available for download over the PlayStation Network today. This is great news for people who have been waiting for a port/remake for so long. So if you have a PSP, you’ll be able to play this classic that changed the role playing genre anywhere you want.

I was probably around 5 to 8 years old at a family Christmas party. My older cousin and my dad were discussing this new game called Final Fantasy. They had trouble playing because they didn’t know how to create a party approprietly. This is the first image I remember:

Yes, that is a 4 black belts party. Of course I didn’t really know what it was and it was all a bit overwhelming to me so I didn’t play that game until much later. I didn’t hear more about Final Fantasy or any other RPG until years later when my father bought Dragon Warrior.