Final Fantasy VI Classic Jobs Part II
Apr. 30th, 2023 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingSession 2 was played on or around October 27, 2017.
I discussed the setup in the previous (first) post, but I didn't draw attention to the sidebar image I used, which offers a bit of additional explanation. It looks like this:
The first concern I raised after I started at Figaro Cave was that I was worried about how Banon's stats would work out. Because of the nature of the team at that part of the game, Banon would be a thief, and although he wouldn't have his Health command anymore there would be a white mage there... but I worried about his survivability, and he still needed to live during the raft ride. But that wasn't happening quite yet!
I bought some new equips in South Figaro and generally raided the town. As my best damage-dealer, I gave Terra the Hermes Shoes. I think I made swords enable two-hand and I tried using Edgar wielding a sword two-handed to give him more substantial difference, and that worked pretty well. Along with a Hyper Wrist equipped, despite his low level, he could swing for over 100 damage on Mt. Koltz enemies. Once I grabbed the Atlas Armlet / Gigas Glove, it was up to roughly 150 damage. I mean, that's no tools command! But it's not awful.
The first boss from this point was Vargas, which I had to modify since no characters have the Blitz command. Although Mt. Koltz was pretty hard without tools, the Vargas fight was basically just a throwaway. One fire spell kind of skipped the scripted scene to bypass the requirements of this battle.
Sabin joined as my first permanent white mage, equipped with a staff that would eventually give him access to the Cure spell before espers appear. Until he learns Cure, he's also got his Pray command, which is weaker, but free.
At this point, I had a good friend in my stream chat and I explained a few things to him with a bit of detail. There was an explanation of my custom Flee and Pray commands, and another one talking about the nature of Ted Woolsey's localization decisions. This was happening while wandering back and forth outside of the Returner Hideout as I wanted reasonable levels for Banon to survive Ultros on the river. But Banon joined at level 10 - so I guess I had anticipated this as a potential issue.
The river presented no particular challenge and I took the most direct route. The battle with Ultros can be bad, if he were to, say, target Banon with tentacle twice or something. There were a lot of things in my favour though, despite the lack of Tools, Blitz and full-strength Pray. Ultros' script is based around counters to specific commands and in a few cases those weren't triggered. As an example, Terra cast Bolt instead of Fire, which is slightly stronger, and doesn't trigger his "seafood soup" counter.
Sabin died at one point, but otherwise, it went fine. Banon ended up taking him out with a slash o' the knife.
That 336 damage was from Terra's Bolt spell, not the knife. Banon wasn't pulling nearly that much damage!
I started Sabin's scenario and pretty much immediately ran into the first obvious error with Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition:
It turns out I had never set Shadow's name by speaking to him in South Figaro, resulting in him still having his character slot's original name of Mogret. This issue is corrected by the end of this conversation. I also quickly noticed that Shadow still has Interceptor which I'm just going to accept.
Cyan joined at just level 6, with no ability to grind levels before his one-on-one with the Captain. Cyan, as a knight, is also very slow. The Captain's Axe attack took away nearly half of Cyan's hit points. This didn't go super well.
I gave some consideration to relic setups and waiting for heals, and spent more than a reasonable number of Hi-Potions but won on the second try. I didn't end up having to try to gain levels to wiggle his level higher via averaging. Phew, I hope I'm past this low-level, early-game stupidity pretty soon.
I also tried beating Telstar/Satellite. This is to get an early Green Beret and to have him pop up on the Veldt later for more of 'em. That didn't go well either. This time, I did wander around gaining experience for a bit. Although FF6 doesn't generally require any form of grinding - it can be beaten relatively easily at its minimum level in an unmodified game - the game's experience curve was constructed somewhat carefully: early game enemies aren't worth much experience at all until after the Narshe battle with Kefka, which makes it so that Sabin's very lengthy scenario doesn't radically unbalance the characters. It still does unbalance the characters, but not radically.
To give something like an example of how bad early FF6 is for grinding experience, the Leafers/Leaf Bunnies outside of Narshe each give 24 experience total. The Bombs on the Phantom Train in Sabin's scenario give just 35. An elementary enemy shortly after the Narshe battle, Red Fang/Bloodfang, gives 135. The progression through what's probably normally over an hour of gameplay is pretty minimal, only to jump significantly after Narshe. It would take some real intentionality to get to level 15 prior to the meet-up in Narshe, and that's in an unmodified game! In this hack, characters are generally starting lower.
Anyway... I did eventually get Telstar's Green Beret with Sabin and Shadow each at level 10. When Cyan actually joined them he remained at level 6. I got Cyan to level 7 outside of the Phantom Forest while also re-accumulating just a few Hi-Potions and then saved for the night.
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I discussed the setup in the previous (first) post, but I didn't draw attention to the sidebar image I used, which offers a bit of additional explanation. It looks like this:
The first concern I raised after I started at Figaro Cave was that I was worried about how Banon's stats would work out. Because of the nature of the team at that part of the game, Banon would be a thief, and although he wouldn't have his Health command anymore there would be a white mage there... but I worried about his survivability, and he still needed to live during the raft ride. But that wasn't happening quite yet!
I bought some new equips in South Figaro and generally raided the town. As my best damage-dealer, I gave Terra the Hermes Shoes. I think I made swords enable two-hand and I tried using Edgar wielding a sword two-handed to give him more substantial difference, and that worked pretty well. Along with a Hyper Wrist equipped, despite his low level, he could swing for over 100 damage on Mt. Koltz enemies. Once I grabbed the Atlas Armlet / Gigas Glove, it was up to roughly 150 damage. I mean, that's no tools command! But it's not awful.
The first boss from this point was Vargas, which I had to modify since no characters have the Blitz command. Although Mt. Koltz was pretty hard without tools, the Vargas fight was basically just a throwaway. One fire spell kind of skipped the scripted scene to bypass the requirements of this battle.
Sabin joined as my first permanent white mage, equipped with a staff that would eventually give him access to the Cure spell before espers appear. Until he learns Cure, he's also got his Pray command, which is weaker, but free.
At this point, I had a good friend in my stream chat and I explained a few things to him with a bit of detail. There was an explanation of my custom Flee and Pray commands, and another one talking about the nature of Ted Woolsey's localization decisions. This was happening while wandering back and forth outside of the Returner Hideout as I wanted reasonable levels for Banon to survive Ultros on the river. But Banon joined at level 10 - so I guess I had anticipated this as a potential issue.
The river presented no particular challenge and I took the most direct route. The battle with Ultros can be bad, if he were to, say, target Banon with tentacle twice or something. There were a lot of things in my favour though, despite the lack of Tools, Blitz and full-strength Pray. Ultros' script is based around counters to specific commands and in a few cases those weren't triggered. As an example, Terra cast Bolt instead of Fire, which is slightly stronger, and doesn't trigger his "seafood soup" counter.
Sabin died at one point, but otherwise, it went fine. Banon ended up taking him out with a slash o' the knife.
That 336 damage was from Terra's Bolt spell, not the knife. Banon wasn't pulling nearly that much damage!
I started Sabin's scenario and pretty much immediately ran into the first obvious error with Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition:
It turns out I had never set Shadow's name by speaking to him in South Figaro, resulting in him still having his character slot's original name of Mogret. This issue is corrected by the end of this conversation. I also quickly noticed that Shadow still has Interceptor which I'm just going to accept.
Cyan joined at just level 6, with no ability to grind levels before his one-on-one with the Captain. Cyan, as a knight, is also very slow. The Captain's Axe attack took away nearly half of Cyan's hit points. This didn't go super well.
I gave some consideration to relic setups and waiting for heals, and spent more than a reasonable number of Hi-Potions but won on the second try. I didn't end up having to try to gain levels to wiggle his level higher via averaging. Phew, I hope I'm past this low-level, early-game stupidity pretty soon.
I also tried beating Telstar/Satellite. This is to get an early Green Beret and to have him pop up on the Veldt later for more of 'em. That didn't go well either. This time, I did wander around gaining experience for a bit. Although FF6 doesn't generally require any form of grinding - it can be beaten relatively easily at its minimum level in an unmodified game - the game's experience curve was constructed somewhat carefully: early game enemies aren't worth much experience at all until after the Narshe battle with Kefka, which makes it so that Sabin's very lengthy scenario doesn't radically unbalance the characters. It still does unbalance the characters, but not radically.
To give something like an example of how bad early FF6 is for grinding experience, the Leafers/Leaf Bunnies outside of Narshe each give 24 experience total. The Bombs on the Phantom Train in Sabin's scenario give just 35. An elementary enemy shortly after the Narshe battle, Red Fang/Bloodfang, gives 135. The progression through what's probably normally over an hour of gameplay is pretty minimal, only to jump significantly after Narshe. It would take some real intentionality to get to level 15 prior to the meet-up in Narshe, and that's in an unmodified game! In this hack, characters are generally starting lower.
Anyway... I did eventually get Telstar's Green Beret with Sabin and Shadow each at level 10. When Cyan actually joined them he remained at level 6. I got Cyan to level 7 outside of the Phantom Forest while also re-accumulating just a few Hi-Potions and then saved for the night.
< Previous | Index | Next >
