Penultimate Fantasy (C64 Cartridge)

A Final Fantasy clone. Evil ravages the land and has stolen the four elemental crystals. Fight, level up, find your comrades and fight the four bosses to free your land. Use your technics, find where and what to steal, learn techs (there’s only two though) and gather magic spells.

If you get defeated, continue. All your stats, items and deeds are still there.

Walk about with joystick. Push button to enter a menu, where you can use items or magic from your inventory, change equipment, examine surroundings (and toggle switches) or return to the game. Every few steps you’ll have random encounters.

Using EXAM on a bed or a spring will revive and fully heal the complete party

During the battle the time bars slowly fill. Once a time bar is full the character can choose an action to perform. FIGHT attacks with your weapon, SPECIAL depends on the character, MAGIC lets you use spells and ITEM lets you use an item.

In battle, during target selection for spells, pushing right on a player will select the whole player party, pushing left on a single enemy selects all enemies. This only works where the spells allow this (attack magic and cure spells)

SPECIAL commands:

STEAL – tries to steal an item from an enemy. Not every enemy has an item, and not every steal attempt is successful. Some rare items can only be gotten by stealing
TECH – use STUDY to learn a tech from an enemy. There are only two technics, but they are quite powerful. Not every enemy has a technic to study, and not every study attempt is successful.
JUMP – Lets the character perform a long jump. The jump keeps the character out of the battle for three turns and attacks the targetted enemy afterwards. This can be useful to avoid being hit.
MIMIC – Uses randomly one of the chosen enemies attack against himself

ITEMs:

HERBS replenishes 50 HP
ETHER replenishes 50 MP
FENIX DOWN revives a character
ANTIDOTE cures poisoning

Game tips:
Try to get all magic spells and equipment. Also, gather your comrades as soon as possible. Bosses appear when stepping on a certain tile in the map. They have certain elemental resistances and weaknesses. Your characters will be killed, so keep RAISE handy!
Once you have all four crystals return them to their podests.