Final Fantasy VI Classic Jobs Part IV
May. 16th, 2023 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis session was originally played in the evening of November 3, 2017.
This session ended up being a long one! I decided to do Locke's scenario first. Doing the dungeon underneath South Figaro with a pure thief and a pure white mage was interesting; all of the knight-ish equipment that Celes would normally be getting access to doesn't really do us any good, and neither Locke nor Celes have much capacity to end random battles quickly. To keep these two delicate characters alive, Celes was using Pray frequently. There was nothing so hard that I couldn't take the detour to get the hidden Ribbon though.
Once again, I decided to make this non-grindy game kind of grindy by fighting these very low-experience-yield enemies in the basement and Figaro Cave hoping to get Locke and Celes some extra levels. The boss at the end of Locke's scenario, which comes up pretty darn quickly, is really meant to be encountered with both Celes' Runic command (which she does not have) and a generally better offense. Locke ended up at level 13 and Celes at level 12. Those are pretty high levels, actually! My goal was to beat TunnelArmr without using the Thunder Rod, since that could be very useful for my black mage characters.
Somehow TunnelArmr ended up being really easy. Celes was a strong healer and I was surprised at how much damage Locke was doing with his Main Gauche - often ~170 or so.
I started Terra and Edgar's scenario and remembered to put the Thunder Rod on Terra. After Locke's scenario, seeing Edgar's high damage with regular attacks was refreshing. The rest of that scenario isn't too interesting. I made sure to save once in the mines just in case the Narshe group battle turned out to be impossible, although I didn't expect that.
I decided to make two really strong teams for the battle, and leave Gau on his own since he was my lowest-levelled character by quite a bit.
Each of my two core teams got a knight and a white mage, with Locke the thief on one group and Terra the black mage on the other.
Normally, in the Narshe battle, Edgar is an absolute boss. His Bio Blaster and Autocrossbow can clear most of the formations with strong multi-target damage. In this case though, the battles were more trivialized by the Pray command than anything else, as free healing is rather rare here. Knights also really showed their power, with Edgar dealing over 500 damage when circumstances were in his favour (criticals, back-attacks). The battle was still a bit interesting though, what with only two functional teams participating; we had to dash around taking out the soldiers. I probably could've rushed Kefka, but I didn't.
When I cleared out all of the soldiers, I stripped the other teams and got Locke's team fully geared-up. I wanted to use this team in particular because I wanted to steal from the Hell Rider. His Silver Pike attack did rather extreme damage to Cyan on the first turn, and shortly after I managed to steal the Mithril Vest. The battle otherwise wasn't too bad.
Vs. Kefka, Locke managed a quick steal and then we just piled on physical damage. Cyan was strong enough that it was still pretty quick. Cyan actually got knocked out at one point, too, but Sabin got him back on his feet in time to deal the final blow.
Now this part of the game gets interesting, because this is the part where my minor event hack takes place to allow us to recruit Mog early. I ended up discussing this hack and some of the ideas behind it in this GameFAQs topic. In brief, I changed the trigger for Lone Wolf showing up so that instead of "you've got the airship" it's "you fought Kefka". I hadn't actually tested this, so I thought there was a chance it was going to break things... but it didn't!
Mog is available at the party select screen, although he doesn't actually appear wandering around Arvis' house like the other characters. Although he isn't very Mog-like as a black mage, it felt quite novel having him for this part of the game.
Thus, I left Narshe toward the western part of the continent with a party of Edgar the knight, Locke the thief, Sabin the white mage, and Mog the black mage. I mainly chose this party because it allows me to view most of the optional event text during this segment of the game which I was interested in because of the base hack being Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition. I also wanted to use Locke instead of Gau because Gau's level was still much lower.
I did some shopping in Jidoor which included the Mithril Staff (which now teaches Antdot/Poisona) and the Mithril Rod (which now teaches Blizzard), and then I proceeded to Zozo. In Zozo, I started to notice that battles felt faster than normal; without exotic commands like Tools and Blitzes and such, and given that my knights are actually quite strong with regular attacks.
SlamDancers/VeilDancers are as tough as ever, at least when they are on their own.
The battle pictured above was an excellent opportunity to use Locke's custom Flee command!
Dadaluma can be an interesting battle because he's got certain actions done in response to specific battle commands. I was expecting something with a different flavour than the usual, given my strange party setup, but actually Mog using Thundara just ended the battle in like 2 or 3 turns.
I equipped my first espers - Cait Sith on Celes and Siren on Mog - and took a trip back to Narshe just to swap equipment and change the party a bit. I ended up taking Cyan the knight instead of Edgar for a change, where Cyan was just level 11. Edgar, Locke and Sabin are all pretty high-levelled for this part of the game, actually, but it's kind of hard to compare things given the circumstances.
This session ended up being a long one! I decided to do Locke's scenario first. Doing the dungeon underneath South Figaro with a pure thief and a pure white mage was interesting; all of the knight-ish equipment that Celes would normally be getting access to doesn't really do us any good, and neither Locke nor Celes have much capacity to end random battles quickly. To keep these two delicate characters alive, Celes was using Pray frequently. There was nothing so hard that I couldn't take the detour to get the hidden Ribbon though.
Once again, I decided to make this non-grindy game kind of grindy by fighting these very low-experience-yield enemies in the basement and Figaro Cave hoping to get Locke and Celes some extra levels. The boss at the end of Locke's scenario, which comes up pretty darn quickly, is really meant to be encountered with both Celes' Runic command (which she does not have) and a generally better offense. Locke ended up at level 13 and Celes at level 12. Those are pretty high levels, actually! My goal was to beat TunnelArmr without using the Thunder Rod, since that could be very useful for my black mage characters.
Somehow TunnelArmr ended up being really easy. Celes was a strong healer and I was surprised at how much damage Locke was doing with his Main Gauche - often ~170 or so.
I started Terra and Edgar's scenario and remembered to put the Thunder Rod on Terra. After Locke's scenario, seeing Edgar's high damage with regular attacks was refreshing. The rest of that scenario isn't too interesting. I made sure to save once in the mines just in case the Narshe group battle turned out to be impossible, although I didn't expect that.
I decided to make two really strong teams for the battle, and leave Gau on his own since he was my lowest-levelled character by quite a bit.
Each of my two core teams got a knight and a white mage, with Locke the thief on one group and Terra the black mage on the other.
Normally, in the Narshe battle, Edgar is an absolute boss. His Bio Blaster and Autocrossbow can clear most of the formations with strong multi-target damage. In this case though, the battles were more trivialized by the Pray command than anything else, as free healing is rather rare here. Knights also really showed their power, with Edgar dealing over 500 damage when circumstances were in his favour (criticals, back-attacks). The battle was still a bit interesting though, what with only two functional teams participating; we had to dash around taking out the soldiers. I probably could've rushed Kefka, but I didn't.
When I cleared out all of the soldiers, I stripped the other teams and got Locke's team fully geared-up. I wanted to use this team in particular because I wanted to steal from the Hell Rider. His Silver Pike attack did rather extreme damage to Cyan on the first turn, and shortly after I managed to steal the Mithril Vest. The battle otherwise wasn't too bad.
Vs. Kefka, Locke managed a quick steal and then we just piled on physical damage. Cyan was strong enough that it was still pretty quick. Cyan actually got knocked out at one point, too, but Sabin got him back on his feet in time to deal the final blow.
Now this part of the game gets interesting, because this is the part where my minor event hack takes place to allow us to recruit Mog early. I ended up discussing this hack and some of the ideas behind it in this GameFAQs topic. In brief, I changed the trigger for Lone Wolf showing up so that instead of "you've got the airship" it's "you fought Kefka". I hadn't actually tested this, so I thought there was a chance it was going to break things... but it didn't!
Mog is available at the party select screen, although he doesn't actually appear wandering around Arvis' house like the other characters. Although he isn't very Mog-like as a black mage, it felt quite novel having him for this part of the game.
Thus, I left Narshe toward the western part of the continent with a party of Edgar the knight, Locke the thief, Sabin the white mage, and Mog the black mage. I mainly chose this party because it allows me to view most of the optional event text during this segment of the game which I was interested in because of the base hack being Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition. I also wanted to use Locke instead of Gau because Gau's level was still much lower.
I did some shopping in Jidoor which included the Mithril Staff (which now teaches Antdot/Poisona) and the Mithril Rod (which now teaches Blizzard), and then I proceeded to Zozo. In Zozo, I started to notice that battles felt faster than normal; without exotic commands like Tools and Blitzes and such, and given that my knights are actually quite strong with regular attacks.
SlamDancers/VeilDancers are as tough as ever, at least when they are on their own.
The battle pictured above was an excellent opportunity to use Locke's custom Flee command!
Dadaluma can be an interesting battle because he's got certain actions done in response to specific battle commands. I was expecting something with a different flavour than the usual, given my strange party setup, but actually Mog using Thundara just ended the battle in like 2 or 3 turns.
I equipped my first espers - Cait Sith on Celes and Siren on Mog - and took a trip back to Narshe just to swap equipment and change the party a bit. I ended up taking Cyan the knight instead of Edgar for a change, where Cyan was just level 11. Edgar, Locke and Sabin are all pretty high-levelled for this part of the game, actually, but it's kind of hard to compare things given the circumstances.
