The Journey begins
Heading out properly onto the overworld and towards the Chaos Shrine, I decide it's time to try out my new gear and start fighting. The first thing I notice is the auto-battle function, which I know won't have been on the original, and I don't think was in any other versions I've played. It's a nice little quality of life thing, and I'm going to try and get myself levelled up a bit in the area around the city before heading north.
I pretty quickly decide that given magic is scarce, I head to town and get Clair a Hammer, I'd noticed she could use one, but I'd left her with a staff during my initial shop. Given she, along with the rest of the party, are presently just hitting anything they come across, it makes sense to go for damage at the moment I feel. I do hope that the battles will become a little less trivial as time goes on though, maybe a bit more strategy, or consideration at least.
I start to head towards the Chaos Shrine, and with my party just beating any group of enemies they come across it soon becomes apparent that the volume of enemies in an encounter seems more dangerous than any given individual enemy. It just feels like a numbers game as we go from up to 4 vs 9 down to a more even number, as they whittle away at our HP.
I soon learned that Cure wasn't going to cut it during the grinding, and unlike some other newer games, it seems like our crew was traveling without any stocks or inventory, so I head to the Inn for a quick 30 gil night's rest, then off to the item store. It seems like the items are proportionately way more expensive than the weapons and armour, which I guess makes sense to sort of balance things a little. I pick up three 40 gil sleeping bags that can be used in the field for the whole party and a couple of 50 gil potions, just in case things get dangerous in the field.
Back on the grind, I notice that there's only a small number of stats that are incrementing on level up - HP/Strength/Agility/Stamina/Intellect/Luck - and among them not all of them may upgrade on level up, like I noticed Glitz only increased HP and Intellect going level 3 to 4. Maybe this is just the Black Mage level up pattern? Hard to tell with one of each...
Also the XP becomes a bit unclear with a total being given to the party at the end, but then it's split across the 4 party members - I guess if you wanted to power level one character you could kill off the others and let the remaining character get the amount of XP on the screen? Don't suspect it'll become an issue though.
I'd decided to aim for level 5 before heading into the shrine, just on vibes and it being a round number, and I manage to get there after 26 total minutes. I do sort of love the immediacy of this - I think part of my disengagement with some more modern games come from the fact that everything seems to take so long to make any real headway.
I use a sleeping bag outside the entrance of the Chaos Shrine, which basically serves as a full heal - I guess I'm just so low level that it's partial heal is strong enough for me - and save before heading inside.