Jim's PoV

Jim was grinning ear to ear as his vision fully came online. Just a quick look around gave him a feeling of nostalgia. He had done it! Right in front of him was the brightly painted red barn. Up in the sky there was the reflection of three oddly large moons. His gaze wandered over the landscape and he couldn't help but be impressed. Looking around he noticed the familiar yet different farm.

The layout was the same but the visuals were completely different. He could see the windmill turning in the distance, the grass moving in rhythmic patterns with the wind. Watching the animals moving around, it seemed almost lifelike.

He never really saw cows or chickens before, so he really had nothing to judge them by. But they looked just like the ones on TV! It worked! He was a friggin genius! Feeling smugly satisfied with himself he inhaled deeply. And then he started coughing and hacking uncontrollably.

What the hell was this smell? The only comparison that he could make was when a sewage line broke. Was he smelling manure? He couldn't believe the immense oder that was around him. Is this what a real farm smelled like?

How could anyone live with that stench! Luckily Jim made a few additions to the game before letting his program go at it. Hell, his program made a whole real life looking world from boxy 2D colorful little squares. Adding some extra features was a cakewalk compared to that.

He pulled up one of those hidden features and it had five bars that ranged from zero to one hundred percent. Currently they are all at 100%. They were labeled touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight.

Using his hand he tapped on the slider bar next to the one labeled smell and dragged the bar down to zero. Taking another breath, Jim was relieved when the horrible smell was no longer present. There was now no sense of smell at all.

Jim wanted to create a realistic world but maybe he should have considered not adding a few things. It was really downing his enthusiasm that the instant he loaded in, something like this happened. He heard that farms smelled terrible, but it was not a fact that he thought about when making his game.

Looking at the panel in the top right corner of his vision, he was surprised this addon came in handy already. The original purpose for the addition was that he wanted the whole 'being in pain' thing to be optional. Getting stabbed by an evil little goblin in the gut did not sound like something he wanted to fully experience. It would really suck having to feel your character get hurt or even die.

That was something he did not intend to tolerate in his super fun game. Jim really liked his idea of adding an extra panel to disable pain because it would not interfere with how the game was created. It was a simple and small solution to a big problem.

Jim already knew all the places where the information his senses was being fed to, so it was really easy to add a game interface to act like a middleman and filter out stuff he didn't want to feel. Touch was the main sense that he was concerned with, so he could negate any pain. Technically it was much more complicated than just classifying senses in the traditional five senses archetype. However, classifying each of seven trillion nerve endings into more than five categories was not a priority for him.

Running a sorting program he automatically tagged each nerve ending as one of the five traditional archetypes of senses. It probably wasn't 100% accurate, but should be close enough. Since he'd already done the leg work for the other four senses, he added them to his 'I don't want to feel pain' menu on a whim. Lucky for him it worked out.

He gazed at the one labeled sight with irritation. Why would he ever want to turn down his sight? If he really wanted to blind himself that much, he could put something over his eyes. It just annoyed him because it seemed to have no purpose. He thought the same thing about smell a few minutes ago though.

Randomly his mind wandered to the time he saw his grandparents getting intimate. If only he had the feature to blind himself back then. But the damage was already done years ago. Maybe there was some way he could edit that childhood memory out? That could be a fun new project.

He tried to recover the feeling of awe while looking around at the landscape and he just couldn't do it. It was a dirty and smelly farm. This was not the epic start to an adventure he was expecting. His first attempt at creating the best version of FF3 ever had him standing near a pile of manure. It was hard to get excited over a farming simulator.

But at least he had his other toys. Jim made three main modifications to his character. First was his five senses menu that he had just used.

The next little modification was to his starter character type. Each character has stats like strength, magic, stamina and agility. Normally the highest stats you can have as a player are maxed out at 255. But some non-player characters or NPCs didn't have that limitation. They were mostly boss characters or special harder monsters.

So he just changed the character classification so his growth wouldnt have that artificial limitation. Hopefully his character should be able to grow infinitely. Most people would say it was cheating, and they wouldn't be wrong. But he wanted to view the world he built, and it would be too slow doing that the right and proper way. Maybe when he had more time he would play it without the training wheels. It was tourist mode time!

Jim navigated through the menus with a smile. This still looked almost exactly the same as it was in the real game. It was actually really damn cool. The blue menu screen showed up as a window that hovered in mid air in front of him. As he hovered his hand around the menu, he could see the little cursor that was a gloved white hand follow along.

He could actually manipulate where the screen was if he held out his finger and tapped the top bar to drag the menu. Tapping the lower right hand corner he could even enlarge or shrink the blue screen. It worked just like a window on a computer!

Looking at the screen brought back fond memories. There was a facial picture of himself with his stats near the top left. Jim grinned as he saw the stupid smile on the dorky looking portrait of himself in the menu. He never smiled like that in his life! Below his picture were empty boxes where his party members would be once he recruited them. The top of the main menu listed the current location as "Farm near Alextria."

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On the right hand side there were several different options: Items, equipment, spells, status and log out. Normally it would have said save instead of logout but it looks like the game updated that. He completely forgot about the idea of making sure he could exit the game, but it looks like that gaming database had him covered. Thank you MMORPG databases!

He knew adding other databases like from massively multiplayer online role-playing games was smart! Genius at work baby! Moving his eyes over to the inventory button, he reached out to the tab and clicked on it.

He grinned as the screen changed and he saw the full list of items he had in his inventory. This was the last little modification he made. For his first run through of the game he wanted it to be quick and easy, so he could be a tourist and not have to play the game the long and proper way. Playing the game would be the fastest way to work out the bugs, so he wanted to do a short and dirty easy mode run.

The gil system must have taken some tips from later games. It seemed it was using the one hundred coppers equals one silver, one hundred silver equals one gold system. He maxed out the gil count and it showed that he had one less than a billion gil. That was a lot of nines. When he tried taking it out of his inventory, he was prompted to select the number in gil with three different coin options.

Taking out one gil he rubbed the small copper coin between his fingers. Putting it away, he put a one near the silver icon and a shiny silver coin was in his palm. 100 gil was removed from his total.

Time for gold he mentally thought. Jim put a one next to the gold icon and a large gold coin appeared in his hand. 10,000 gil was removed from his money stash. Satisfied he transferred the gold coin back into his inventory. It was a little ridiculous but he figured why not max out the gil count?

Looking at the long list of goodies he had stacked away made him smile. He had ninety nine of everything in the game. The cool thing about FF3 was the fact that there were all sorts of different gear with different stats. Of course there were still a number of armors and weapons that were considered the best in the game, but that didn't mean they were always the best for every situation.

Beyond that he wanted to see how all the different equipment looked. There were so many different types of armor and weapons to play around with. There were suits of armor that were black and menacing, to caster robes of all different colors, from traditional gentlemen's suits to thieves garb, there was everything in between.

Plus who could forget the armored bikini? But how would these pixelated tiny images transfer into something that looked closer to real life? He would need to find a mirror and judge the badassery of each equipment set. Afterall, what was the point of being a total badass if you didn't look like a badass too?

Absently Jim noticed that something seemed to be hitting his shoulder. Glancing at it, he saw little white specks on his shoulder. He irritably looked up and saw a few birds perched on the barn overhead. Little pricks were bombing him. Annoyed, he moved a distance away from the farm while continuing to look at his loot.

He had ninety nine Elixirs and ninety nine Greater Sources. Jim double checked to make sure nothing changed, and he smiled as he verified that they still did the same thing.

Elixir - Fully recovers all Hit Points(HP) and Mana Points(MP). Also cures all status effects including KO(Knock Out).

Greater Source - Gives the user 25 Stat Points(Strength, Agility, Magic and Stamina).

Elixirs were generally beyond rare in the game, only being rewarded when doing some side quests or found in really obscure locations. They were basically four items all rolled up into one. They would restore all your Hit Points(Full Healing Potion), Mana Points(Full Mana Potion), Cure All Status Effects(Remedy Potion) and Cure Knock Out(Revive Potion). Everything but a Full Mana Potion can be done using magic, but magic could only do one of the effects per turn. Not only that, but they cost Mana Points(MP).

To have ninety nine of them at the start of the game was beyond broken. But even more broken than that was having ninety nine Greater Sources. A Greater Source was one of the rewards for beating the hardest bosses in the game, which was not the final boss. A super boss! That was one thing that was cool about Final Fantastic 3. There were super bosses around even stronger than the final boss, but your party needed to be powerful and use good tactics to beat them.

Getting just one of them was extremely desirable considering the max stats possible were 255. This item was one of the few ways to actually get your stats that high, and there were only three of them in the entire game. He had almost a hundred, and he wasn't limited by a measly stat cap anymore!

Jim decided it was time to start celebrating and drank one. They actually tasted fantastic! Soon he found himself drinking one after another but eventually his stomach became really sick. His vision blurred and he got a massive headache. Somewhere in the middle of his drinking spree, he remembered losing his balance. The last thing he remembered was falling to his knees.

When Jim woke up everything seemed to hurt. He closed his eyes trying to focus. Even just putting his hand on his forehead felt like a chore. Things he didn't even know he had hurt, it was terrible. Noob move, he intentionally made a system to dodge feeling pain, yet he didn't even have it turned on. But why was there pain to begin with?

Slowly opening his eyes, he tried to navigate to his five senses menu so he could turn this horrible feeling off. After opening his eyes he received a jolt of pain. The light was blinding! It was like staring into a spotlight, but a hundred times worse. He figured just waiting a couple minutes would fix the problem as his eyes adjusted, but the lightning pain behind his eyes did not go away.

After his failure he closed his eyes again and groaned. Jim wished the five senses interface were all mental commands. He tried drunkenly to stab at the right place where the icon would be if his eyes were open. After a few minutes he must have gotten it right because the pain died away. The down side? He opened his eyes without any pain, but he couldn't see a damn thing at all.

Now he just needed to fiddle with his sight so he could actually see something. Continuing the process of randomly jamming his finger around the general area where the sense menu should be, he eventually got it. Finally seeing something and not in pain, he could see that he bumped his sight down to five percent. He mentally gave himself a high five, it wasn't useless after all! He was a friggin genius!

It was really odd though. Why could he see perfectly fine when his sight was at five percent? Curiously, he slowly dragged the bar upward and watched as everything became much more detailed. It felt like he hit the zoom button.

Jim could see insects on the far away cows. He could count individual blades of grass at what seemed like a mile away. And then the splitting headache came. Quickly turning it back down to five percent, he reflected on the experience. He now had his own built-in binoculars! That was cool as hell. Genius baby!

Thoroughly satisfied with his toys Jim decided he was ready to head out. There was a whole world to explore. It was time for a new adventure!