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freshfeelingThis was originally played sometime close to August 5, 2018.
I started saying, "This is a fun part of the game". And I think that's generally pretty well true; I enjoy playing Galuf's world and the game goes kind of quickly at this part in general. But we're starting this session in the bottom of Barrier Tower which, unfortunately, is a very grindy spot for a lot of Four Job Fiesta parties. Even if you don't need levels, abilities or money, this is the earliest place to get Reflect Rings and a reasonable place to try to steal a Flame Ring (which can be challenging to get elsewhere) if those end up being necessary because of your party's limitations. Reflect Rings are a really good fallback strategy against Exdeath at the end of Galuf's world if your party doesn't have some clearly preferable strategy.
Bartz the bard largely continued to completely wreck random encounters using Romeo's Ballad while the others cleaned up. Galuf the ninja used !Smoke to escape some of the less profitable encounters partly to save time, but partly to raise my escape count for the sake of an eventual Chicken Knife. Altogether, in most battles, I didn't actually expend any resources.
After a while, I decided to go fight the Red Dragon in the trapped treasure chest, so I equipped the Flame Rings I had accrued in the first world. I didn't realize the chest also had a chance to be a battle with a pair of Yellow Dragons; there was a close call in there.
Shortly after when I faced a Red Dragon in the same chest without a back attack, things went swimmingly! It was supposed to, given the Flame Rings and Golem and Requiem and all.
So then we got the chest's Gold Hairpin, which is a nice prize! In this game, it's a piece of head equipment with terrible stats but it halves the MP costs for the equipped character. The only character who can benefit from this at all is the summoner, but that's still pretty exciting.
It was about 50 minutes of grinding, partly fast-forwarded, for me to get my fourth Reflect Ring! But I got it.
Consequently, my levels were pretty high for this part of the game.
And then it was on to Atomos! It was a fairly long battle. Bartz couldn't really contribute too much to the fight himself. The best offence I had was Gaia Gear-boosted Titan summons. This may have been the closest I've come to having a character devoured by Atomos. I mean, I've been killed by Comets a fair few times but I don't think anyone has come as close to being eaten than Bartz here.
In the average FF5 playthrough, I love getting to Moore because of the level 5 black and white magic spells. In this case, it didn't really end up helping too much. At least Air Knives can be good, and I was also able to take a short trip to get the Catoblepas summon.
Next, we headed into Sage Ghido's sunken cave. The team tore the enemies here apart, particularly Galuf with two Air Knives equipped. Metamorphs have a wind weakness such that my ninja was able to deal over 3000 damage with regular attacks. I remembered the layout of the cave and its puzzle from my other recently playthrough, so I took pretty much the single most direct route. Irritatingly, after that hour-long grind for Reflect Rings, I got 3 Staves of Light just from arbitrary random Metamorphs I fought. (Normally, those are pretty great, but this team can't even use them.)
We went through the Forest of Moore without issue. I wore Flame Rings into the crystal fight, and forgot I had Flame Rings on, and reset. That was dumb, but we got back quickly. Really, this fight is the reason so many FJF teams like to have Flame Rings. The tried-and-true strategy that allows pretty well any team to win here is, get the fiery crystal at the top down to half hit points so that it uses a very strong Firaga every single turn that you absorb. With that, and Regen and Golem, the fight is actually pretty trivial.
Lenna the summoner mostly used Sylph, which is rather weak, but it just makes sense to use non-elemental attacks here and it's an additional source of very minor healing. Bartz wasn't able to contribute very effectively so he kept throwing out stat-boosting bardsongs. The real damage came from people beating the crap out of primeval magical crystals.
From this point, the battle was trivial.
We got our new recruit and headed directly into Exdeath's Castle. When it got to the moving bridge thing, for some reason I messed it up about 5 times. I remembered the layout well enough to get to Carbuncle easily... and I even remembered a trick about this fight:
Carbuncle becomes vulnerable to petrification at certain points when his phase changes!
Then we're onto the... fourth? battle with Gilgamesh. The fight isn't generally too hard, although it was awkward when he used Timeslip without me having any option at all to remove the "old" status. Krile's Twin Lance-fueled ninja attacks and Lenna's empowered Titan summons still dealt enough damage to compensate, though.
After that, we dressed up in our Reflect Rings to battle Exdeath. I hadn't bought a ton of Hi Potions despite my amazing wealth, which made healing awkward. Swords don't do much for me in this playthrough, so I threw a few of them with Krile. I was panicking about those HP numbers and trying to avoid squandering Elixirs when I somewhat surprised myself by winning before the worst attacks came out.
Onto the third world!
