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freshfeelingThis was originally played on August 10, 2018.
Immediately at the start of this session there was a gargoyle fight for entering the second major dungeon of the third world. The first one, in the previous session, had been somewhat iffy and challenging. This one wasn't; it was accidentally just amazing, with Faris the monk dealing criticals on the first gargoyle followed by Krile the ninja eliminating the second one with her strong attacks.
Speaking of Krile the ninja, the sidebar image was finally updated.
A funny thing about using an image with text in it to facilitate a Twitch stream is that we all have to live with the typographical error forever.
Doing the Island Temple on the Big Bridge... is pretty useless. It's necessary to proceed through some later dungeons, but this dungeon itself probably had the least to offer my team in terms of abilities and equipment, and battles against randoms like the oddly-named Tot Aevises just drag on forever. After having stated previously that I felt a bit overlevelled, I was contrasting my levels and performance in this run with that of my concurrent Dancer/Blue Mage/Dancer/White Mage run, and realized they lined up quite well in the mid-30s.
Wendigo was a weird fight; it definitely felt like I had no magic bullet for this one. My party wasn't obviously suited for strong single-target attacks nor healing up from counters to multi-target attacks, so I used a mixture of these. It was a bit hard and involved a lot of hi-potions to make it go faster. When this happened:
I really thought I may have stumbled onto something good! But it didn't stick.
Besides the counters, Wendigo really isn't particularly strong, so we just measured out our hit points and balanced our often-ineffective melee attacks with occasional empowered-Syldra summons.
It was ultimately a Syldra summon that took him down. And then we had to stand there waiting for the clones to die for a bit. As I said, this dungeon didn't do much of anything for us but at least it was neither hard nor time-consuming... other than Tot Aevises.
I decided to go to the Phoenix Tower next. The "interesting" thing about this place is that some of the enemies have above average defense, but the Chicken Knife, Faris' criticals and summon magic all ignore that so it didn't feel like the random battles were much of a barrier. One of the Kuza Beasts in a wall wailed on Krile for 8000+ damage though, so that was new and different. I imagine that was caused by the "????" blue magic.
In a random battle where Parthenopes affected me with Roulette twice, I said, "This tower would be perfect to go through after getting the Phoenix summon", and then supposed that may have been the point. Besides the usual repetitiveness and such, finishing the Phoenix Tower was no big deal. I probably should've just done Bahamut on the same trip, really, but I didn't. I forgot about North Mountain being in the desert.
I went to Fork Tower next, and actually put the people in the appropriate towers. Minotaur was quick-n-dirty, really only using the Attack command and hoping Faris' HP and Krile's mirages would collectively hold out, which they did.
Now Omniscient's name just ended up being a weird irony or something. I was planning on having Lenna use boosted Syldra while Bartz supported her with songs. I had them both equipped with Reflect Rings. Then, of all of the possibilities, Omniscient decided to cast Silence on himself.
The rest of this battle went, uh, predictably. The silence effect didn't seem to stick for very long but Syldra was doing ~3500 damage each time, gradually rising due to Bartz' song. It was over quickly and painlessly.
With Fork Tower beaten, I had access to my ship's underwater mode and thus could enter Istory Falls. My hope was to get Kaiser Knuckles as a random drop so that we could just skip the Deep Sea Trench entirely. The gargoyle fight went badly this time, actually reviving once, but I've got access to enough damage that it didn't really matter. The fights were trivial, and most of the treasures are terrible, too. Getting things like a Turtle Shell and an Air Knife in treasure chests is hard to get excited about.
I didn't realize I had walked on some of the trap spikes in the dungeon and they do pretty substantial damage. When I got to Leviathan and engaged him, I had rather low hit points! I thought I had made up for it with hi-potions pretty quickly, but three consecutive tidal waves still resulted in a TPKO. It's been a while!
I had really been enjoying using Hero's Rime with Bartz and watching him boost the entire team's damage, so I did that here. There are some odd behaviours with Leviathan's additional turns I saw in my second attempt, actually. His AI sometimes just gets a whole extra turn. One time, he did a tidal wave for ~750 on the whole party, followed by a physical attack that seemed to hit Krile for over 1000 while she had ~1500 max hit points. Clearly she should've died; I believe that follow-up physical was blocked by Golem but it didn't animate because it was part of a double action.
We won shortly after this, getting the Leviathan summon and a dropped Reflect Ring that brought our count to 7.
This second attempt obviously went better though I'd mostly attribute that to luck.
Let's let the summon train roll and get Bahamut. I cruised up to North Mountain. I didn't remember this fight well, as it hasn't made any sense to fight Bahamut in my last few years of playthroughs, so I didn't remember, for example, that Bahamut uses a few different minor breath attacks. I made a few little input errors, and then I ate a Mega Flare:
I was pretty worried here, wondering if this was a "final attack" situation that I needed to find means to survive, or if I just needed to beat him faster like in Final Fantasy IV. I gave it one more shot and, without command errors, it ended this way instead:
I was legitimately surprised - and you can hear that in the stream recording. It wasn't really any kind of strategic difference or anything, so it was confusing, but good!
I also decided to try to do the Deep Sea Trench. There is basically nothing to gain here other than Kaiser Knuckles, which might benefit Faris somewhat. The battles aren't hard, certainly not for any parties with access to Requiem or a Sage Staff, but due to the abundant lava it's pretty nasty for any group with so little healing. It is so unusual to legitimately think, "I wish I had a geomancer."
The bosses can be pretty easy. I used the Magic Lamp for the first time here... and then the second time, and then the third time to get an Odin summon that oddly ignores certain properties....
After a long and very annoying dungeon I was happy to avoid a long and annoying boss fight.
I did a bit of shopping and also unlocked the remaining sealed weapons for nearly no reason. Maybe some of them can be thrown?
Immediately at the start of this session there was a gargoyle fight for entering the second major dungeon of the third world. The first one, in the previous session, had been somewhat iffy and challenging. This one wasn't; it was accidentally just amazing, with Faris the monk dealing criticals on the first gargoyle followed by Krile the ninja eliminating the second one with her strong attacks.
Speaking of Krile the ninja, the sidebar image was finally updated.
A funny thing about using an image with text in it to facilitate a Twitch stream is that we all have to live with the typographical error forever.
Doing the Island Temple on the Big Bridge... is pretty useless. It's necessary to proceed through some later dungeons, but this dungeon itself probably had the least to offer my team in terms of abilities and equipment, and battles against randoms like the oddly-named Tot Aevises just drag on forever. After having stated previously that I felt a bit overlevelled, I was contrasting my levels and performance in this run with that of my concurrent Dancer/Blue Mage/Dancer/White Mage run, and realized they lined up quite well in the mid-30s.
Wendigo was a weird fight; it definitely felt like I had no magic bullet for this one. My party wasn't obviously suited for strong single-target attacks nor healing up from counters to multi-target attacks, so I used a mixture of these. It was a bit hard and involved a lot of hi-potions to make it go faster. When this happened:
I really thought I may have stumbled onto something good! But it didn't stick.
Besides the counters, Wendigo really isn't particularly strong, so we just measured out our hit points and balanced our often-ineffective melee attacks with occasional empowered-Syldra summons.
It was ultimately a Syldra summon that took him down. And then we had to stand there waiting for the clones to die for a bit. As I said, this dungeon didn't do much of anything for us but at least it was neither hard nor time-consuming... other than Tot Aevises.
I decided to go to the Phoenix Tower next. The "interesting" thing about this place is that some of the enemies have above average defense, but the Chicken Knife, Faris' criticals and summon magic all ignore that so it didn't feel like the random battles were much of a barrier. One of the Kuza Beasts in a wall wailed on Krile for 8000+ damage though, so that was new and different. I imagine that was caused by the "????" blue magic.
In a random battle where Parthenopes affected me with Roulette twice, I said, "This tower would be perfect to go through after getting the Phoenix summon", and then supposed that may have been the point. Besides the usual repetitiveness and such, finishing the Phoenix Tower was no big deal. I probably should've just done Bahamut on the same trip, really, but I didn't. I forgot about North Mountain being in the desert.
I went to Fork Tower next, and actually put the people in the appropriate towers. Minotaur was quick-n-dirty, really only using the Attack command and hoping Faris' HP and Krile's mirages would collectively hold out, which they did.
Now Omniscient's name just ended up being a weird irony or something. I was planning on having Lenna use boosted Syldra while Bartz supported her with songs. I had them both equipped with Reflect Rings. Then, of all of the possibilities, Omniscient decided to cast Silence on himself.
The rest of this battle went, uh, predictably. The silence effect didn't seem to stick for very long but Syldra was doing ~3500 damage each time, gradually rising due to Bartz' song. It was over quickly and painlessly.
With Fork Tower beaten, I had access to my ship's underwater mode and thus could enter Istory Falls. My hope was to get Kaiser Knuckles as a random drop so that we could just skip the Deep Sea Trench entirely. The gargoyle fight went badly this time, actually reviving once, but I've got access to enough damage that it didn't really matter. The fights were trivial, and most of the treasures are terrible, too. Getting things like a Turtle Shell and an Air Knife in treasure chests is hard to get excited about.
I didn't realize I had walked on some of the trap spikes in the dungeon and they do pretty substantial damage. When I got to Leviathan and engaged him, I had rather low hit points! I thought I had made up for it with hi-potions pretty quickly, but three consecutive tidal waves still resulted in a TPKO. It's been a while!
I had really been enjoying using Hero's Rime with Bartz and watching him boost the entire team's damage, so I did that here. There are some odd behaviours with Leviathan's additional turns I saw in my second attempt, actually. His AI sometimes just gets a whole extra turn. One time, he did a tidal wave for ~750 on the whole party, followed by a physical attack that seemed to hit Krile for over 1000 while she had ~1500 max hit points. Clearly she should've died; I believe that follow-up physical was blocked by Golem but it didn't animate because it was part of a double action.
We won shortly after this, getting the Leviathan summon and a dropped Reflect Ring that brought our count to 7.
This second attempt obviously went better though I'd mostly attribute that to luck.
Let's let the summon train roll and get Bahamut. I cruised up to North Mountain. I didn't remember this fight well, as it hasn't made any sense to fight Bahamut in my last few years of playthroughs, so I didn't remember, for example, that Bahamut uses a few different minor breath attacks. I made a few little input errors, and then I ate a Mega Flare:
I was pretty worried here, wondering if this was a "final attack" situation that I needed to find means to survive, or if I just needed to beat him faster like in Final Fantasy IV. I gave it one more shot and, without command errors, it ended this way instead:
I was legitimately surprised - and you can hear that in the stream recording. It wasn't really any kind of strategic difference or anything, so it was confusing, but good!
I also decided to try to do the Deep Sea Trench. There is basically nothing to gain here other than Kaiser Knuckles, which might benefit Faris somewhat. The battles aren't hard, certainly not for any parties with access to Requiem or a Sage Staff, but due to the abundant lava it's pretty nasty for any group with so little healing. It is so unusual to legitimately think, "I wish I had a geomancer."
The bosses can be pretty easy. I used the Magic Lamp for the first time here... and then the second time, and then the third time to get an Odin summon that oddly ignores certain properties....
After a long and very annoying dungeon I was happy to avoid a long and annoying boss fight.
I did a bit of shopping and also unlocked the remaining sealed weapons for nearly no reason. Maybe some of them can be thrown?
