![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis was played on August 14, 2018, just two days before I completed my concurrent Dancer/Blue Mage/Dancer/White Mage game. I had actually started that other playthrough a couple of weeks before this one.
Really, almost the entire session was just the final boss. I happen to have used a very time-consuming strategy against Exdeath. At the beginning, I mentioned that ersatz_cats, who I had followed on Twitter for a while, gave me some good advice in regards to using Apollo's Harp. ersatz_cats usually does a whole bunch of runs every year with a few interesting moments and insights shared on the regular.
I really appreciate this game's very late "point of no return"; I triggered the last cutscene before Exdeath and then went back and saved.
I tried a strategy from Enkibot; it was suggested that a character using the bard's !Hide command can just hide while Exdeath runs through all of its MP. I let this run for a bit with fastforward and I'm not sure it's actually effective. Maybe this is one of those version-sensitive things, or maybe I was just too impatient.
This didn't seem to be working out, since Exdeath wasn't even using MP in its first phase. What we needed was to run his HP down a bit before attempting this, so I reset and started over.
I had set Bartz to sing Hero's Rime, which is mostly a good idea, but when Exdeath started casting high-MP-consumption spells I was unable to use !Hide. Thankfully (?), Exdeath quickly killed Bartz using Holy. I revived Bartz and he hid, and while Exdeath ran through his MP I told a lengthy story about a dead squirrel.
After the squirrel story, I got Bartz back into the battle and revived the rest of the team. The intent is, by having Exdeath be more survivable, it would buy me more comfortable time for Bartz to sing to buff the team a huge amount to make the subsequent Neo Exdeath battle far quicker and easier. Unfortunately, Exdeath still seemed to have his MP... but I didn't mind, given all of his attacks in this particular phase are single-target anyway. It just rendered the whole lengthy wait during the squirrel story somewhat pointless for anyone who didn't want to hear a story about a squirrel.
Bartz took shifts singing songs like Hero's Rime and Swift Song and such to boost our stats and levels while everyone else used Golem and healed with items. I set a goal for myself to just keep doing it until my number of remaining Phoenix Downs was about 20. At one point I accidentally used !Call and got Carbunkle; I was quite worried Exdeath's reflected spells might push him into the next phase, where he would cast Meteor! But that didn't end up being the case, thankfully.
Eventually, I am pretty sure I had maxed or near-maxed speed, with characters getting essentially instant turns. I asked nicely for Exdeath to target Bartz and he quickly obliged. I also observed that after so much Hero's Rime, White Hole was now missing consistently since our levels were greater than Exdeath's.
Finally, I decided to begin the offensive! Bartz applied Mighty March (regen) and Lenna applied Carbunkle - intentionally, this time - to prevent Flare and Holy. Then I attacked just a couple of times to end this battle, quickly enough that we didn't see Meteor.
The roughly 30-minute Exdeath battle left us exceptionally well-prepared for Neo Exdeath, although there was still some concern of things like Almagest wiping the entire party. My main offense targetted the upper-left section, while I tried using Catoblepas to quickly petrify the lower-right section which can use Almagest. This ended up working out:
With that, the rest was actually pretty darn trivial. The final blow was struck with a summoned Odin using Gungnir against the back part. #victory !
Here's our final status:
Really, almost the entire session was just the final boss. I happen to have used a very time-consuming strategy against Exdeath. At the beginning, I mentioned that ersatz_cats, who I had followed on Twitter for a while, gave me some good advice in regards to using Apollo's Harp. ersatz_cats usually does a whole bunch of runs every year with a few interesting moments and insights shared on the regular.
I really appreciate this game's very late "point of no return"; I triggered the last cutscene before Exdeath and then went back and saved.
I tried a strategy from Enkibot; it was suggested that a character using the bard's !Hide command can just hide while Exdeath runs through all of its MP. I let this run for a bit with fastforward and I'm not sure it's actually effective. Maybe this is one of those version-sensitive things, or maybe I was just too impatient.
This didn't seem to be working out, since Exdeath wasn't even using MP in its first phase. What we needed was to run his HP down a bit before attempting this, so I reset and started over.
I had set Bartz to sing Hero's Rime, which is mostly a good idea, but when Exdeath started casting high-MP-consumption spells I was unable to use !Hide. Thankfully (?), Exdeath quickly killed Bartz using Holy. I revived Bartz and he hid, and while Exdeath ran through his MP I told a lengthy story about a dead squirrel.
After the squirrel story, I got Bartz back into the battle and revived the rest of the team. The intent is, by having Exdeath be more survivable, it would buy me more comfortable time for Bartz to sing to buff the team a huge amount to make the subsequent Neo Exdeath battle far quicker and easier. Unfortunately, Exdeath still seemed to have his MP... but I didn't mind, given all of his attacks in this particular phase are single-target anyway. It just rendered the whole lengthy wait during the squirrel story somewhat pointless for anyone who didn't want to hear a story about a squirrel.
Bartz took shifts singing songs like Hero's Rime and Swift Song and such to boost our stats and levels while everyone else used Golem and healed with items. I set a goal for myself to just keep doing it until my number of remaining Phoenix Downs was about 20. At one point I accidentally used !Call and got Carbunkle; I was quite worried Exdeath's reflected spells might push him into the next phase, where he would cast Meteor! But that didn't end up being the case, thankfully.
Eventually, I am pretty sure I had maxed or near-maxed speed, with characters getting essentially instant turns. I asked nicely for Exdeath to target Bartz and he quickly obliged. I also observed that after so much Hero's Rime, White Hole was now missing consistently since our levels were greater than Exdeath's.
Finally, I decided to begin the offensive! Bartz applied Mighty March (regen) and Lenna applied Carbunkle - intentionally, this time - to prevent Flare and Holy. Then I attacked just a couple of times to end this battle, quickly enough that we didn't see Meteor.
The roughly 30-minute Exdeath battle left us exceptionally well-prepared for Neo Exdeath, although there was still some concern of things like Almagest wiping the entire party. My main offense targetted the upper-left section, while I tried using Catoblepas to quickly petrify the lower-right section which can use Almagest. This ended up working out:
With that, the rest was actually pretty darn trivial. The final blow was struck with a summoned Odin using Gungnir against the back part. #victory !
Here's our final status:
