The Stack

OK, I realize I’m already in the middle of a JRPG. But The Brainy Gamer’s Vintage Game Club has just chosen Chrono Trigger as their latest game to collectively play though and discuss, and since it’s on the Stack, I may as well play along. And anyway, it looks like I’ll have plenty of time to play FF6 between Chrono Trigger sessions. The Club has a week-by-week schedule for synchronizing play, and I’ve just completed the first week’s allotment in a single session.

Apparently Chrono Trigger is considered by many to be the best JRPG ever. Having grown up as a PC gamer rather than a console gamer, I had no idea. The only reason I own a copy already is that it came with the anthologized Final Fantasy for Playstation, taking the place of FF3 (which still has only been released for Nintendo consoles). It was a collaboration between the creators of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Ball franchises. Of these, Final Fantasy is the only one I’m greatly familiar with, so that’s the main thing I’m comparing it to in my mind as I play.

The mechanics are basically Final Fantasy-like, with the ATB combat system and all, but the presentation is greatly different. Combat mode isn’t cleanly separated from exploration mode, but happens on the same screen. To support this, your entire party is always visible as distinct sprites, rather than lumped into a single unit like in most Final Fantasy games. (In these respects, we see Square catching up to what Ultima 6 did a few years earlier.) Random encounters don’t just happen to you suddenly, like pits you fall into, but instead, monsters are seen going about their monster business before you fight them — even when you walk into an ambush, there’s animation of the ambush being sprung, like a mini-cartoon, usually with some slapstick in it.

The characters themselves get to be more detailed than in a Final Fantasy, because they’re not squashed to the size of a map tile. For that matter, map tiles are a less noticable feature all round. Presumably the maps are still tile-based, but the tiles are never a constraint to movement, and the overland map looks extremely freeform.

Speaking of freedom on the overland map, I was surprised at just how much the game lets you wander around before getting down to the plot. You basically get the run of the continent, and probably another continent besides (there seems to be a ferry, although I didn’t take it). The game guides you pretty clearly, though. Wherever you go, everyone is talking about the Millennial Fair. The Fair is one of the closest things to your starting location, and it’s chock-a-block with interactive doodads to keep your attention focused there. At the fair, an accident with an experimental teleporter (invented by the protagonist’s meganekko friend) causes someone to disappear, leaving only a pendant behind. I went to pick up the pendant, figuring that it would be important in the investigation of what happened, only do discover that the game interpreted my action as a signal that I wanted the teleporter turned back on immediately so I could follow the missing person wherever she went. (A singularly irresponsible moment — who’s to say she wasn’t simply vaporized? We know from the title that it’s a time-travel game, but have the characters read the box?)

I was tempted at this point to go back to my last save, as I wasn’t finished exploring yet. But I kept on playing anyway, knowing that I’d be back: they wouldn’t have made all that world if they weren’t going to use it. And indeed, by now I’ve been back and again away. I’ll say this for the game: it moves at a pretty good clip. The story’s been pretty simple, and (perhaps a little ironic for a game about time travel) entirely focused on the present moment. That is, it hasn’t been going in for lingering mysteries or obvious set-ups for later events. It’s just a series of misadventures that your gang of anime stereotypes tumble into one after the other.

Since nothing much interesting happened during my last session, let’s back up a bit and describe the beginning of the World of Ruin section of the game. After the dirigible wreck, the curtain opens on Celes waking up from a coma. Perennial FF bit-player Cid is looking after her, and she immediately develops a granddaughterly attachment to him. Yes, Celes, former General of the Imperial Army, has been reduced to childishness. This is really just par for the course for her, though. When we first encountered her, she was in a state of complete helplessness, imprisoned and interrogated by her former colleagues. Her one other big moment in the spotlight was one of forced feminization, shanghaied into impersonating a prima donna and singing about how she longs for a hero to rescue her. Progressive it ain’t. One imagines the producers saying “Whoa, Celes is career military? That’s not traditionally feminine at all! She might alienate female players, those delicate flowers. So we’d better wimp her up a bit more on the story level just to be on the safe side.”

But anyway, Celes is all alone in a broken world with Cid, who quickly takes her place in the sickbed. Cid says that there used to be other people on the island, but they “died of boredom and despair”. Once you leave the shack, you quickly realize two things about the world map: it’s radically changed, and you can’t reach most of it. You’re stuck on a small island with no way off. You naturally wander around for a while, but there’s nowhere to go and no goals to pursue. Perhaps you’re afraid at first of getting into random encounters, because you’ve got only one character and most combats are calibrated in difficulty for three or four. But in fact you have nothing to fear: the monsters on this island are so pathetic, they just die spontaneously even if you just stand there doing nothing.

I’m reminded a little of that essay about Metal Gear Solid 2, positing that it was designed specifically to deprive the player of expected rewards. On Cid’s island, the very activities you’re used to are stripped away: you can’t meaningfully explore, and you can’t meaningfully fight. All you can do is keep going back to visit Cid and monitor his deteriorating condition. Boredom and despair! Eventually Cid dies ¹I’m told that there’s actually a way to cure him, but it’s obscure enough that most players are guaranteed to miss it unless they’re playing from a walkthrough. , and Celes attempts suicide by leaping off a cliff. This moment is accompanied by an instrumental arrangement of the aria Celes sang atop the castle in the opera scene, and the climb up the cliff is a visual echo of the ascent that set — reminding us again of Celes’ need to be rescued.

Of course the suicide attempt fails: she washes up on the beach, and shortly afterward manages to get off the island by means I won’t go into here. I’ve ranted before on multiple occasions about how the gameplay and the narrative in Final Fantasy essentially exist in different worlds. This whole sequence is a rare example of the opposite: the gameplay, including random encounters, reinforces the narrative and emphasizes the intended mood. It’s telling that this happens in a scene where you have access to only one character, giving the author more control than would normally be the case.

I’m progressing slowly, but I’m progressing. The latest roadblock is a scene with a time limit, recuing a child from a house that’s about to collapse. I don’t particularly like time limits at the best of times, and it seems to me that the Final Fantasy games have aspects that make them particularly annoying. Random encounters are delays, and they’re delays that crop up unpredicatably and uncontrollably while you’re trying to do something else. It makes me impatient, and once I’m impatient, I start bristling at little things like the seconds spent on uninterruptible UI actions like bringing up the combat interface and shutting it down again.

It follows pretty close on the heels of another timed sequence, too: the escape from the Floating Continent. There have been time limits in other Final Fantasy games, but not with this density. That escape wasn’t so bad, though, because the fights were winnable quickly: there was usually only one foe, so everyone dogpiled on and wiped him out without having to wait for their ATB timers to fill up a second time. In the new one, I only have one character to use, and she has to take on multiple foes at once. The closest thing I have to a power that can wipe out an entire group at once is the Esper summons, and if I use those, I have to sit through an impatience-aggravating summon animation. It may actually be worthwhile to run away from battles for once.

If Final Fantasy V was a big experiment in different character abilities, Final Fantasy VI is where they started experimenting with different ways to activate those abilities. Several characters have special interfaces in the place of the series of menus that is game’s standard for most interactions.

The simplest of these is Cyan’s “Sword Technique” interface. As he gains levels, Cyan gains a number of different sword moves, and each move has a number. When you select “SwdTech” in the combat interface, a progress bar starts filling up, waiting for you to press a button. The bar is labelled with numbers; pressing the button activates the technique corresponding to how long you waitied before pressing it. It’s an interesting approach to take in combination with the ATB system, because you can imagine weighing the power of the more advanced moves against the time you have to spend standing there waiting while the monsters still attack you. But since this also makes you delay giving orders to the entire rest of your party, it seems hardly worthwhile. So in practice, I almost never use anything other than Technique #1. Maybe this will change as I learn better techniques, but I’m tentatively willing to call this particular UI experiment a failure. And it seems Squaresoft agrees; I don’t think they reused this interface in any later game.

Sabin’s interface, now: that’s been passed on. Sabin is an expert in unarmed combat, and has a system apparently inspired by the special moves in Street Fighter-style fighting games. When you select “Blitz” in the combat interface, you have to press a series of buttons and/or D-pad directions, such as left-right-left or triangle-square-down-up, to indicate the move. If you enter an invalid combo, Sabin does nothing. And that’s a serious possibility. Not only does it require memorization (or, alternately, note-taking), but I find that the moves containing diagonals can be difficult to execute: a sequence like down-down/left-left pretty much has to be done in a rolling motion, and it’s far too easy to roll too far or not far enough with the controller I’m using. Still, it’s a lot easier than doing a special move in a real fighting game, because you can take your time and don’t have to worry about being interrupted.

Setzer’s special-move interface, on the other hand, is entirely timing-based. Or rather, if you’re me, it’s luck-based, but gives you just enough illusion of control to make it feel like you might be able to get the effects you want if you could just time it a little more precisely. It’s one of those slot-machine-like things where you get to stop the spinning wheels, one by one, by pressing a button — get them to match, and you can do a devastating magic attack, or summon a random summonable for free, or various other effects. Effects aside, the basic interface here is one I’ve seen as a minigame or bonus round in a few other Japanese games, including Pokémon and, in a slightly varied form, Super Mario Land. I suppose there are people who have mastered the skill and excel at getting Japanese bonuses. I personally can never do anything with it, and was glad when I acquired an artifact that replaced the Slots interface with something I could actually use: a skill that lets Setzer simply deal damage by throwing money at the problem. The interface to that? You just select it in a menu.

I wish I could say that I made some real progress in my last session. I put together a team that could beat the ninjas and dragons of the floating continent — and I emphasize that these are not just your garden variety IronFists or WireyDragons or any of the other qualified variations encountered earlier in the game, but Ninjas and Dragons, the definitive versions, as befits the guardians of the secret source of all the world’s magic. But they’re not the only things keeping visitors out. The whole floating continent is a maze with trigger-spots that change it when trod on, and I managed to get into a position where a crucial trigger-spot for moving forward seemed to be no longer accessible. I had no idea that was even possible.

I had no choice to go back to the airship, and while I was there I figured I might as well check up on a sidequest that I hadn’t managed to finish, and that took me near the Veldt, so I figured I should take Gau and Strago out for a spin to see if they could pick up any new moves. ¹I’ve described the mechanics around Gau and Strago in previous posts, but to recap: Gau is a wild-boy who attacks by imitating monsters. In order to learn how to imitate a monster, he has to observe it in the Veldt, which is kind of like a retirement home for things you’ve defeated elsewhere (even things that are highly location-specific, like security robots). Strago is a Blue Mage who can learn specific monster attacks as spells. Unlike Gau, he doesn’t have to learn them in the Veldt, but it’s a good place for him to pick up things he missed. Within three or four encounters, Gau learned the secrets of the Ninja. But the Dragon I encountered shortly afterward bested my party. And once that happened, I didn’t want to leave. Not until Gau could do the Dragon.

To change topics out of the blue for a moment: The first computer I ever programmed was a TRS-80 Model 1. One of the first simple BASIC programs I came up with was one that filled in randomly-selected pixels in an infinite loop. The slowness of TRS-80 BASIC (considered slow even in its day; serious TRS-80 programmers used assembly language) meant that you could sit there and watch it fill in the pixels one by one. Eventually it would fill in the entire screen, ²Years later, I tried replicating the program in GW-BASIC on an IBM PCjr, and was horrified to discover that it did not fill in the entire screen. The random number generator was so bad that you wound up with a bunch of neat diagonal stripes instead. but you could spend a while waiting for it to randomly select the last unfilled pixel. In fact, you could spend a while waiting for the second-to-last pixel to fill in, and then you’d spend on average twice as long waiting for the very last. ³Or, hm, maybe not. What I really mean is that the expected number of random choices to fill in one specific pixel is twice the expected number of choices to fill in either of two specific pixels. But the ratio of the expectation values is not necessarily the expectation of the ratio. But I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Such were the amusements we found for ourselves in the days before JRPGs. At any rate, I spent some time in the Veldt, doing the things that were tedious when last I played, but which just now seem lazily relaxing. (Such is the effect of context on one’s gaming experience.) Everyone’s learned more of the standard spells. Strago picked up a couple of blue spells that I didn’t know existed, in one case by watching Gau use it in animal-rage mode. I’ll have to remember that that can happen. Ironically, Gau is probably the character to benefit the least from the exercise. Yes, I did eventually meet the Dragon again (or maybe a different one), but the entry for it is so far down on Gau’s list that I doubt I’ll have the patience to scroll down to it often. Gau would be so much more useful if I could rearrange that list.

It’s about time I got back to this, don’t you think? Last night’s session was pretty short, and didn’t really accomplish anything, so let’s just have a brief recap and status update.

When last we left our eclectic band, they were stalling by finishing up side-quests before tackling General Kefka on the floating continent that’s the focus of all the world’s magic. As soon as they defeat him, they will plunge irreversibly into Part 2, which takes place in the wracked and riven remnants of the world they knew. I’m told is called the World of Ruin. And frankly, I think I’m ready for it.

I wish I could say the same for my characters. The party I sent forth to conquer the floating continent this time was repeatedly and frustratingly trounced by roving dragons, ninjas, and weird abominations. I know I managed to get past this bit before, but I don’t remember who I had in my party at that point — presumably someone more useful in combat than the combinations I’ve tried this time around. I’m pretty clear on the story so far: empire, magicite, espers, etc. But what was I doing with the party? I know I was trying to keep advancing all the characters, both in levels and in trainable skills, so I kept swapping them around and changing their equipment. It’ll take a little while to get back into this. Maybe I’ll know what I’m doing by the time I destroy the world again and start advancing the plot.

I know I just compared DROD RPG to Time Zone, but by the end, it was reminding me more of my experiences with Rhem. As I cleared paths of their obstacles, unlocking gates and killing monsters who stand in the way, the area I was playing in effectively expanded, until I was playing with the whole dungeon rather than just my immediate vicinity. As in Rhem, I spent so much time running madly from place to place to do stuff I wasn’t prepared for the first time through that I pretty much internalized the map, which led to beating the rest of the game in a manic burst rather than take a break and lose my place. When I talk about backtracking, I’m not just talking about going back for special items, although that was part of it, but also for stuff as simple as the monsters who were too tough for me initially, but who could now be easily killed for their money, which I could use to upgrade my stats, enabling me to mug even tougher monsters. At any rate, it’s a real contrast to regular DROD, where you generally leave solved areas behind and don’t look back.

Mind you, when I say that I beat the game, I’m only talking about getting to the end credits. There’s an extra boss in a secret area just off the final exit, and I suppose I won’t be fully satisfied until I do him in. Without him, the final boss is a Slayer, which would be more satisfying if I hadn’t already killed one in the secret level of chapter 1. (In particular, when you first see him, his projected damage is ridiculously astronomical, due to the combat mechanic’s nonlinear response to power differences. It’s a nice “You gotta be kidding me” moment, but you only get one of those per enemy.) But that’s what you get when you play the game out of intended order. The designers were clearly thinking in terms of players completing the game the easy way first and only afterward going back for the secrets. That’s why the new items in the secret level were unexplained; when you encounter them over the normal course of chapter 2, there’s usually a helpful guy ¹That’s his name within the game engine. Helpful Guy. It says so when you click on him. nearby to describe them.

I have a pretty clear idea of what I have to do to beat this extra boss, although in order to pull it off, I’ll have to defer getting the Really Big Sword until much later in the game. That’ll make things difficult. Getting the Really Big Sword was a turning point for me, where I suddenly started being able to easily get health significantly faster than I spent it. I suppose I should have taken that as a warning. If it seems easy, you’re doing it wrong. Paradoxical though that is, it could be this game’s motto.

A day or two before my final push, I saw a mention on the DROD forum of Tower of the Sorcerer, a freeware game by “Oz and Kenichi” that allegedly used the same combat system as DROD RPG. Well, the similarities don’t end there. Both games are based on managing health and three different colors of keys (one of which is reserved for plot-crucial doors). I think the most striking point of resemblance is the devices for using money to raise your stats, which function nearly identically in both games, offering you a choice of health, attack power or defense power (with attack increases substantially less than defense increases), increasing the price with each use, increasing the gains as you get to remoter instances of the device (thus motivating you to hold off on upgrades until you can reach a more powerful one). Is DROD RPG a rip-off, then? Hardly. It’s based on TotS, and acknowledges this debt in the credits, but it also adds quite a bit of complexity. From what I’ve seen, TotS doesn’t seem to have anything like the percent-based damage from hot tiles and aumtlichs, and it definitely doesn’t have any way of doing stuff like trying to work your way around a goblin in a tight passage without turning your back to it (one of my favorite puzzle-like bits in DROD RPG). And anyway, I think the folks at Caravel Games earned our indulgence on this point through their indulgence of Wonderquest, which is about as direct a DROD imitation as you could hope to find (although it’s also embellished), and has a section of the official DROD forum devoted to it.

Finally, let’s talk plot a little. Chapter 1 is about Tendry’s escape from the Beneath, chapter 2 supposedly about his rescue of his countrymen who had been abducted by the Empire. We don’t actually get to see him do the latter, though, unless there’s something past the secret boss. There’s a distinct non-ending and promise of sequels, and, well, we’ll see how that turns out. On the other hand, the Empire is discussed enough that I think I’m finally starting to grasp the DROD overplot.

As I understand it, the Empire has two major factions, the Archivists and the Patrons, who split on how they approach the pursuit of knowledge. The Archivists are trying to get all the facts, whereas the Patrons are trying to get as many facts as possible. These might sound like similar goals, but they disagree when it comes to things that generate new facts — for example, foreigners. The Patrons like such things, because they’re an endless source of new things to learn, while the Archivists dislike them, because they perpetually render the Archivists’ knowledge incomplete. Thus, the Archivists want to destroy foreigners while the Patrons want to protect them. (Yes, only bad guys are completists.) It’s the Patrons who move the entire population of Tueno underground, which Tendry sees at first only as an enemy action, not realizing that they’re doing it to save them all from the Archivists’ army. The thing that hasn’t been resolved is what the Patrons intend to do with all these people. Fight a decisive battle against the Archivists and return them to their homes? Release them elsewhere, where the Archivists won’t find them immediately? Keep them in cages and study them? Tendry comments at one point about the Patrons “collecting” his people, which makes me think this isn’t supposed to be a temporary condition. The Archivists are evil, but you have to bear in mind that the Patrons are products of the same deranged system. Who knows what they’re capable of? Not me, certainly. The ending of that story has not yet been written.

I could be working my way towards completing this game, but that secret level keeps taunting me. Just when you think you’ve got it beat, you find out that there’s one more obstacle, requiring resources you’ve used up by that point. So you start over, and you go back into the main dungeon to start with more keys this time, and you optimize more thoroughly so you can hold off on using items that you now know you’ll need later. One of the big lessons for me this time round has been the unintuitive value of keeping your health as low as possible most of the time. There are things that, instead of knocking off a fixed number of hit points, reduce your health by a percentage: I’ve already mentioned the aumtliches, and there are also hot tiles that knock you down by 5%. ¹In Beethro-centered DROD, hot tiles kill anything that stays on them for more than a turn. This is one of many ways in which Tendry shows himself as tougher than Beethro, assuming that his tale can be believed. (And he assures us that every word is true, so how can we doubt it?) So if you have to expose yourself to such hazards, it makes sense to leave any healing potions alone until afterwards: (0.95x)+200 > 0.95(x+200). At one point, after going through a series of aumtlich beams, I had exactly one hit point left. I consider this to be one of my greatest triumphs of planning, as I had taken exactly the minimum amount of damage. (The system rounds percentages against you; if there had been one more beam, I would have died.)

And so, having done this, I have by now made it all the way to the exit of the secret level. And this presents a fresh problem. I mentioned before how the previous levels had some places that could be reached with special tools, including ones (such as the grappling hook) that I’ve only acquired in the secret level. The problem is that once you’re into the main part of the secret level, you can’t go back. There’s a one-way force arrow preventing you from backtracking. I had been hoping that the exit on the far side would return me to a previously-inaccessible part of the previous level, but no, it just sends you on to chapter 2. You can bring one of the special tools into the beginning of chapter 2 with you, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

If there is in fact no return once you’re in the secret level, it’s unusual. Generally, this game allows you to retrace your steps, to go back and face those foes who outmatched you on first meeting, make short work of them with your new gear, and carry off whatever they were guarding. The only outright exception is the transition from chapter 1 to chapter 2. There have been places where I’ve gone through a force arrow with no immediate prospect of return, but this is always a temporary condition — unless I do something that cuts off my path, like leave a floating platform where I can’t access it any more. It’s possible that the secret level fits that category. At the very least, I could escape back to the main dungeon if I still had the Wall Walking token. So perhaps the solution is even more heroic optimization? We’ll see. I’m honestly on the verge of giving this up for a while and getting back to chapter 2, which I expect will seem very easy in comparison. (It certainly didn’t seem easy in comparison to the rest of chapter 1.)

In a way, the secret level reminds me of the endgame of Time Zone. They both have a point of no return, producing gameplay marked by repeatedly restoring much earlier saves in order to get back to said point of no return with more stuff, or at least different stuff. The crazy thing is that I know for a fact that people involved in the production of DROD RPG have read my blog post complaining about that very ending, and how it extended the experience of the game by diluting its fun. But of course it’s very different here. It isn’t just a matter of entering the same series of commands, hoping not to make a mistake. Every time I play through the familiar bits, I’m asking myself if I can squeeze it a little more, come out a few more hit points or greckles ²The unit of currency in DROD. ahead. Plus, of course, everything about the secret level and the inaccessible areas is completely optional.

So, I managed to get through the alternate exit in chapter 1, the one behind the wubba. I don’t want to give away too much, but it involved exploiting a special property of one of the useable items, a property that I had read about when I found said item, but which I had forgotten about, because it didn’t seem important at the time. When I read about it again during my second playthrough, knowing what lay ahead, it suddenly clicked. I had access to another wubba-slaying tool all along and didn’t know it.

But using it in that way meant that I couldn’t use it elsewhere, and consequently getting through the necessary areas involved massive loss of health. But that’s okay, because I had massive amounts of health to lose. This game doesn’t use a D&D-style hit points system, capping the benefit you get from healing potions at your “max hit points” attribute determined by your experience level and other stats. Instead, it’s more like the healing system in Ultima 1, where the only limit on your hit points is imposed by how much healing you have available.

Past the alternate exit is an entire secret bonus level. Many tools are scattered around this level, of various degrees of familiarity, including the long-anticipated tool for jumping over 1-square gaps. (It turns out to be a grappling hook.) I hope I manage to get back into the previous level to take advantage of it — by the time you get it, you’re past a bunch of one-way arrows and have no direct route back. The game also makes you ditch your weapon and use far weaker ones for their special properties. I had seen a Wooden Blade already in the course of chapter 2: its whole purpose is that it can be used in places where metal weapons are forbidden. I hadn’t seen the “briar hacker” before, but it was pretty clear from its name what it’s good for: cutting through briars. But what about the “lucky blade” that I found deeper in the corridors? I have no idea what its special attributes are, but I assume they’ll be crucial to getting through the level, so I suppose I should keep playing chapter 2 at least up to the point where it’s explained.

By now, I’m well into the second and more difficult of DROD RPG‘s two chapters. Apart from plot, the two chapters are self-contained: at the beginning of chapter 2, Tendry is stripped of all his equipment. Chapter 2 makes things more complicated by providing options that were absent in chapter 1, such as spending money to raise your stats. Finding adequately efficient ways to spend your scarce resources is tricky. I pretty much played chapter 1 straight through, but in chapter 2 I’m frequently saving the game to try out different options and see how they play out. I’ll probably want to restart completely at some point, to better take advantage of some secret areas I didn’t notice early enough to use optimally.

But that might wait until I’ve completed chapter 1 to my satisfaction. There seems to be a whole chain of undocumented special items that enhance Tendry’s ability to go places and do things and get more special items, and I’ve probably only scratched the surface of it.

The first significant item is an invisibility potion which lets you sneak by spontaneously-attacking monsters. This seems somewhat optional: it doesn’t actually open up any new territory, but it does make it a lot easier to get another special item, a one-use “wall-walking” token — that is, a device that teleports you forward two squares, regardless of obstacles. This can obviously be applied in all sorts of situations, but is best used in a situation where nothing else will do. My first thought was to use it to get into a certain doorless enclosure I had noticed containing a door-opening device called a Portable Orb, but once I was in that enclosure, there was no way out. So instead I used it to enter a different inaccessible area that had a door that could be opened from the other side. There, I found a handheld bomb, a device capable of destroying even wubbas.

And that’s as far as I’ve got. I can kill the wubba blocking the staircase near the final exit, but the bomb doesn’t have enough range to kill the snake blocking the corridor behind the wubba as well. It’s likely that there’s something else I should be using the bomb on, but it only affects items, not architecture. There are a couple of other obvious inaccessible spots, including some some platforms leading out over a pit like stepping stones, but with no way to get from one platform to the next. There’s a similar set of platforms in chapter 2, with a Really Big Sword (the kind Beethro uses) clearly visible in the middle. There has to be some way to jump from platform to platform — say, a pogo stick or something.

I haven’t found any devices like these in chapter 2 yet. They seem like general-use items, so it’s possible that they’re introduced over the normal course of the game. I’ve only just encountered the first non-portable bombs, for example, so it’s conceivable that the game will introduce handheld ones next. If so, encountering new items in chapter 2 may give me some idea of which obstacles they should be applied to in chapter 1.