My first encounter with the fictitious metal was in Square’s GBA port of Final Fantasy II. Having never played the game before, I was completely unfamiliar with its unique levelling system. The evil emperor of Palamecia had begun his plot for world domination, and four young adults escaped with their lives as all they knew turned to ash at his feet. Allying themselves with a rebel force, they managed to secure an item that proved their worthiness to join Princess Hilda in the fight. Her first request was for the party to aid the Wild Rose Rebellion by securing them a source of mythril.
And thus began the suffering of Firion, Maria, and Guy.
In the event you have played the game yourself, there’s a strong chance you know how this story will go down. Nonetheless, I choose to share the tale. FFII does not share the traditional level-up system the other FF games have, instead allowing the player to level affinity with weapons and spells individually. Everything has its own experience pool; there is no singular point requirement that provides an overall boost to a character.
This even extends to stat values. Maria, for example, will not necessarily gain higher intellect by simply killing a single enemy with a dagger. No, she has to be casting magic, and she has to be casting a lot of it. Not only that, it has to be a black magic spell, or else she’ll be raising her spirit stat instead. In the original Famicom release of the game, some stats go down randomly because another went up. It turns out that Firion choosing to study the blade causes him to lose intelligence. This sort of simulated creating roles for your characters, much like how the first game had the class system; however, later remakes would remove this element altogether.
The point of me explaining this is to say I had no idea how to properly deal with it, and I’m willing to bet many others were in the same boat. It’s a system that sounds fantastic on paper, but the execution in this game was not exactly perfect. I actually quite enjoy FFII; over the years, I came to master its peculiar framework. That said, there is no scenario in which you will ever organically level the Esuna spell to become more useful. Levelling spells through frequent casting essentially means you must pointlessly cast a status removal spell over and over just so that it grows more powerful. You will never be thrust into a situation where Esuna becomes such a necessity that it will naturally reach Level 8.
Another issue my younger self faced was my complete unfamiliarity with the concept of grinding. How did I play RPGs back then? Very simple to answer! I simply gunned from plot point to plot point and did my best to survive with the gear I had. This meant that by the time I reached the bottom depths of the dungeon known as the Semitt Falls, I had no reliable method to defeat the boss protecting the mythril.
This guy, the Sergeant, is burned into my brain the same way Firion has nightmares about his family getting barbequed by Palamecian chefs. Probably. For the point of the game he’s at, he has very high physical defence, meaning that absolutely none of my attack commands were doing so much as a scratch. Almost every single blow inflicted upon him dealt a truly awe-inspiring value of 0 damage. In return, he would deplete half of someone’s HP in a single round, and then kill them the next. Even with the temporary white wizard in my party, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t beat the Sergeant! And I had his mythril equipment to blame.
The obvious answer, in hindsight, was to simply use attack magic. If he has high physical defence, well, you should take advantage of his magical defence, right? Unfortunately, I was not the strongest thinker when it came to this genre. Things are much different now, of course, but my favourite strategy back then was to simply spam the attack command (or GF if it was FFVIII). By the time I even considered magic as an alternate strategy, my party would be at death’s door, causing me to become wholly focused on survival over offence, which only delayed the inevitable. Not only that, but at the start of the game, characters start with a pitiful 5 to 10 MP! If you haven’t been spamming casts, you won’t have enough of them!
So how did I beat this guy? Loading save states. I just kept reloading the same couple save states mid-fight until I would just somehow do a good enough roll that someone would manage to deal, oh, I don’t know, 4 points of damage? It was a sad state of affairs, but I didn’t know any better at the time. I just brute-forced the whole thing until eventually, at some point during the day, the Sergeant finally kicked the bucket. He apparently has 420 HP, so just think to yourselves for a moment what an absolutely horrifying amount of time it must have taken.
As I said earlier, this was my first encounter with mythril. All I was familiar with at the time was Final Fantasy. I didn’t play other RPGs, nor did I even have a single clue about anything Tolkien. Never once had I ever played anything remotely close to Dungeons & Dragons; that came later and became its own bag of worms. No, my next encounter with mythril would be in RuneScape, where it was spelt “mithril”. I share this story because it strongly shaped the way I would feel about the ore.
Imagine you are me, playing this game where I was tasked to retrieve this random item called “mythril” from a cave. Yeah, sure, why not? Absolutely simple affair. Real shame about the imperial soldier at the bottom wearing it who simply refuses to die! Fortunately, as a dirty emulator user, I was able to exercise my control over space-time to simply rewind the battle enough times that the Sergeant would eventually die from all the tiny scratches he received. It left an intensely strong impression on me. Mythril horrified me.
No matter the book, the game, the movie, if I hear a single peep about mythril, I think about the Sergeant. I think about how, in my misguided youth, I believed mythril was completely impenetrable. Anyone wearing it was the stuff of nightmares. Unless it was me. Then I was cool. It was almost like a mark that signified I had finally become a competent fighter and traveller. At least for a little while, anyway. I would always eventually realise mythril was not that big of a deal. Soon after getting it in FFII, you find other ways to die, and new gear besides. It’s almost never the strongest gear in anything I’ve played. I don’t even need mythril in FFII now; if you raise your evasion level enough, you almost become immortal.
Nonetheless, I will always remember the Sergeant. I will never forget the Sergeant.
(Or the beavers. Never forget the beavers.)
