Final Fantasy VI Classic Jobs Part XV
Jul. 5th, 2023 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis was played on December 12, 2017.
The goal today is to finish Kefka's Tower, which includes a couple of other bosses.
I decided to put my least-favoured characters on a team with Mog, particularly figuring that they were likely to use the Molulu Charm. This ended up resulting in me thinking about each character's "suitability" for their role. I made one character the "main team", which was Edgar the knight, Locke the thief, Celes the white mage and Terra the black mage. Then there was "team default". The teams ended up looking like this:
I outfitted the first team the most optimally. That said, I fully intended to pass the shields in particular back and forth between the teams because I had exactly two Force Shields for mages and the one Hero Shield usable by thieves.
I started in with Cyan's team, Team Default. The team gets to Atma/Ultima pretty quickly, and I considered whether to fight it or not. I had multiple random encounters with fairly tough Yojimbo enemies in that same room. We engaged the Ultima Bst in battle after those. I am not sure why it was abbreviated like that. The fight went well, with many of its attacks missing or otherwise being ineffective because of our shields. Setzer's magic and Cyan's sword strikes were dealing good plurals of thousands of damage.
Next up was the Gold Dragon. I noted that its weakness is water and I've really got zero access to that in this game, but given how Ultima went I didn't expect a challenge. Shadow was absorbing nearly all attacks with the Hero Shield and the mages were barely being damaged at all. We dealt damage with Cyan's strong attacks and Setzer's Flare spells, but Shadow ended up dealing the finishing blow with his Wing Edge. This even unlocked our final esper!
After the Gold Dragon, I said, "I hope I don't encounter those awful ninjas!" at which point I encountered those awful ninjas... Outsiders, that is. I was scared of them so Setzer cast Ultima, which must've triggered something nasty in their script as the battle went utterly haywire with thrown weapons and Meteor spells. We got wiped out.
With that, we had to fight the Gold Dragon again. It went a lot like the first time, and was quite easy. The key difference was me explaining the party wipe to my chat throughout.
After that, we swapped to Edgar's team - the main one - and gave them appropriate shields and espers. We had a really long and useless battle with a single Doom Dragon that I was originally excited for but it really didn't go well. I spent a lot of time with that stupid dragon before using Locke's Flee command to get out of there.
We arrived at the three switches and set all of that up, and thankfully got the save point where you'd normally find Guardian (who I had already defeated earlier).
Cyan's team - Team Default - entered the battle with Poltrgeist, called Demon in this hack. We had a much better setup than last time, especially defensively, and Setzer was throwing out nice strong Bio spells for ~4500 damage throughout. This goddess fights with a lot of fire attacks, which healed Shadow and barely damaged Strago and Setzer. We won, and claimed the zwill Blade (from Final Fantasy VI Advance) in lieu of the normal Aura Lance.
Mog's team, unequipped except for Molulu Charm, just walked to their final save point as I had already defeated Doom/Fiend earlier. This left Edgar, Locke, Celes and Terra to face Goddess, whose name is unchanged. This boss uses mostly lightning, but also has some unique tricks like Cloudy Heaven. It used Love Token on Locke to have him block physical attacks, too, which left Edgar pretty well doing nothing. Cloudy Heaven came into play a bit after that, and the entire team was turned into zombies. That wasn't good.
We explored options before our second attempt without changing very much. Love Token and Charm presented a few problems here but the recipients of those abilities died fast enough that, with subsequent revival, it didn't end up mattering too much. Shortly after, Terra managed to block Cloudy Heaven entirely, and then we won before the countdown was up anyway. It really made me wonder how close I was on the previous attempt.
As far as picking the roster for the final battles, I could really only pick one knight, one thief, one white mage and one black mage, as if any of them were replaced with someone of a different role it would violate the rules of the playthrough. So I went with Edgar, Locke, Celes and Terra, hoping that nobody would die.
We are really well prepared for these final battles in terms of equipment and such, so I figured the only real threat was cheap shots like Calmness.
Fighting tier 1, I was careful to apply Float so that we wouldn't die a cheap death to his counter-Quake. Edgar was wielding Lightbringer and doing lots of damage with that. Locke switched from Valiant Knife to zwill Blade for a bit due to its defensive properties. Celes applied just about every buff she could: Hastega, Shell, Protect and even Regen pretty much all around. Terra was the only one not floating at the end of tier 1 when Quake happened, but she survived with about half of her HP.
For tier 2, we tried setting poison status (with partial success) and slow status (with no success). Then Terra switched to throwing out Meteors for good damage across all parts. Attacks like Gamma Rays and Diffuser were strongly mitigated for all characters due to a combination of buffs and great resistances on equipment. At one point, it cast Blizzaga on us which missed all four characters.
One part, unfortunately, does a move with multiple consecutive casts of Dispel that ruined all of our buffs. Thankfully, this was right around the time I started casting Reraise with Celes in preparation for the death attacks that could happen in tier 3.
Unfortunately, this was the shape in which we beat tier 2:
Our HP totals were all quite low and the buffs were almost entirely gone. I knew tier 3 was likely to open with Merton/Meltdown... and it did. That wasn't great.
Locke and Celes set about getting everyone else back on their feet with fair success. When I was ready to begin attacking again, I didn't pay attention to some of my elemental properties in attacking "Girl" and kept healing it with Locke's attacks. Oh well. More time for Celes to get us buffed up.
Locke and Edgar took out "Girl" and we didn't particularly dawdle in our assault on "Sleep". As usual, "Sleep" did a death counter of Calmness, instantly killing Edgar and Celes - the two characters who didn't have reraise on.
What happened next surprised me.
I wasn't sure what was going to happen, given that I only picked four characters altogether I kind of thought Edgar and Celes would still be there. Instead, Cyan and Shadow showed up... completely naked. I had no idea it would draw other characters from the rest of the roster in the event of characters being dead between tiers.
In order to preserve the playthrough, I killed Shadow immediately and then gave Cyan a sword so he could do something (although he was wearing no armor). I now had three characters, one very poorly equipped, and none with any access to white magic.
Terra was using Thundaga for over 6000 damage. I computed that, naturally, about ten of these would result in a win. That made it seem pretty attainable! He used Fallen One / Heartless Angel on me and I followed that up with my very last Megaelixir. There was a lot of Elixir-slinging in general, actually. Cyan was knocked down by a lot of attacks, and before I could get him up after Kefka used Goner, Kefka was destroyed.
This was a fun playthrough, although the line of what made this "beat the game with traditional jobs" and "arbitrary personal hack" is perhaps a bit blurry. I think it's a pretty good approximation of beating Final Fantasy VI with a knight, a thief, a white mage and a black mage. It was also fun.
Would I do this particular kind of playthrough again? Almost certainly not. However, I could absolutely see myself doing a different forced-job based remix. A forced dragoon and/or summoner could be pretty cool.
I probably wouldn't use Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition as a base hack; at least for me personally, it didn't really do much to enhance the game for me, it introduced a few problems and I don't agree with all of the translation choices. That said, I'm glad I tried it and there were aspects I found interesting.
The goal today is to finish Kefka's Tower, which includes a couple of other bosses.
I decided to put my least-favoured characters on a team with Mog, particularly figuring that they were likely to use the Molulu Charm. This ended up resulting in me thinking about each character's "suitability" for their role. I made one character the "main team", which was Edgar the knight, Locke the thief, Celes the white mage and Terra the black mage. Then there was "team default". The teams ended up looking like this:
I outfitted the first team the most optimally. That said, I fully intended to pass the shields in particular back and forth between the teams because I had exactly two Force Shields for mages and the one Hero Shield usable by thieves.
I started in with Cyan's team, Team Default. The team gets to Atma/Ultima pretty quickly, and I considered whether to fight it or not. I had multiple random encounters with fairly tough Yojimbo enemies in that same room. We engaged the Ultima Bst in battle after those. I am not sure why it was abbreviated like that. The fight went well, with many of its attacks missing or otherwise being ineffective because of our shields. Setzer's magic and Cyan's sword strikes were dealing good plurals of thousands of damage.
Next up was the Gold Dragon. I noted that its weakness is water and I've really got zero access to that in this game, but given how Ultima went I didn't expect a challenge. Shadow was absorbing nearly all attacks with the Hero Shield and the mages were barely being damaged at all. We dealt damage with Cyan's strong attacks and Setzer's Flare spells, but Shadow ended up dealing the finishing blow with his Wing Edge. This even unlocked our final esper!
After the Gold Dragon, I said, "I hope I don't encounter those awful ninjas!" at which point I encountered those awful ninjas... Outsiders, that is. I was scared of them so Setzer cast Ultima, which must've triggered something nasty in their script as the battle went utterly haywire with thrown weapons and Meteor spells. We got wiped out.
With that, we had to fight the Gold Dragon again. It went a lot like the first time, and was quite easy. The key difference was me explaining the party wipe to my chat throughout.
After that, we swapped to Edgar's team - the main one - and gave them appropriate shields and espers. We had a really long and useless battle with a single Doom Dragon that I was originally excited for but it really didn't go well. I spent a lot of time with that stupid dragon before using Locke's Flee command to get out of there.
We arrived at the three switches and set all of that up, and thankfully got the save point where you'd normally find Guardian (who I had already defeated earlier).
Cyan's team - Team Default - entered the battle with Poltrgeist, called Demon in this hack. We had a much better setup than last time, especially defensively, and Setzer was throwing out nice strong Bio spells for ~4500 damage throughout. This goddess fights with a lot of fire attacks, which healed Shadow and barely damaged Strago and Setzer. We won, and claimed the zwill Blade (from Final Fantasy VI Advance) in lieu of the normal Aura Lance.
Mog's team, unequipped except for Molulu Charm, just walked to their final save point as I had already defeated Doom/Fiend earlier. This left Edgar, Locke, Celes and Terra to face Goddess, whose name is unchanged. This boss uses mostly lightning, but also has some unique tricks like Cloudy Heaven. It used Love Token on Locke to have him block physical attacks, too, which left Edgar pretty well doing nothing. Cloudy Heaven came into play a bit after that, and the entire team was turned into zombies. That wasn't good.
We explored options before our second attempt without changing very much. Love Token and Charm presented a few problems here but the recipients of those abilities died fast enough that, with subsequent revival, it didn't end up mattering too much. Shortly after, Terra managed to block Cloudy Heaven entirely, and then we won before the countdown was up anyway. It really made me wonder how close I was on the previous attempt.
As far as picking the roster for the final battles, I could really only pick one knight, one thief, one white mage and one black mage, as if any of them were replaced with someone of a different role it would violate the rules of the playthrough. So I went with Edgar, Locke, Celes and Terra, hoping that nobody would die.
We are really well prepared for these final battles in terms of equipment and such, so I figured the only real threat was cheap shots like Calmness.
Fighting tier 1, I was careful to apply Float so that we wouldn't die a cheap death to his counter-Quake. Edgar was wielding Lightbringer and doing lots of damage with that. Locke switched from Valiant Knife to zwill Blade for a bit due to its defensive properties. Celes applied just about every buff she could: Hastega, Shell, Protect and even Regen pretty much all around. Terra was the only one not floating at the end of tier 1 when Quake happened, but she survived with about half of her HP.
For tier 2, we tried setting poison status (with partial success) and slow status (with no success). Then Terra switched to throwing out Meteors for good damage across all parts. Attacks like Gamma Rays and Diffuser were strongly mitigated for all characters due to a combination of buffs and great resistances on equipment. At one point, it cast Blizzaga on us which missed all four characters.
One part, unfortunately, does a move with multiple consecutive casts of Dispel that ruined all of our buffs. Thankfully, this was right around the time I started casting Reraise with Celes in preparation for the death attacks that could happen in tier 3.
Unfortunately, this was the shape in which we beat tier 2:
Our HP totals were all quite low and the buffs were almost entirely gone. I knew tier 3 was likely to open with Merton/Meltdown... and it did. That wasn't great.
Locke and Celes set about getting everyone else back on their feet with fair success. When I was ready to begin attacking again, I didn't pay attention to some of my elemental properties in attacking "Girl" and kept healing it with Locke's attacks. Oh well. More time for Celes to get us buffed up.
Locke and Edgar took out "Girl" and we didn't particularly dawdle in our assault on "Sleep". As usual, "Sleep" did a death counter of Calmness, instantly killing Edgar and Celes - the two characters who didn't have reraise on.
What happened next surprised me.
I wasn't sure what was going to happen, given that I only picked four characters altogether I kind of thought Edgar and Celes would still be there. Instead, Cyan and Shadow showed up... completely naked. I had no idea it would draw other characters from the rest of the roster in the event of characters being dead between tiers.
In order to preserve the playthrough, I killed Shadow immediately and then gave Cyan a sword so he could do something (although he was wearing no armor). I now had three characters, one very poorly equipped, and none with any access to white magic.
Terra was using Thundaga for over 6000 damage. I computed that, naturally, about ten of these would result in a win. That made it seem pretty attainable! He used Fallen One / Heartless Angel on me and I followed that up with my very last Megaelixir. There was a lot of Elixir-slinging in general, actually. Cyan was knocked down by a lot of attacks, and before I could get him up after Kefka used Goner, Kefka was destroyed.
This was a fun playthrough, although the line of what made this "beat the game with traditional jobs" and "arbitrary personal hack" is perhaps a bit blurry. I think it's a pretty good approximation of beating Final Fantasy VI with a knight, a thief, a white mage and a black mage. It was also fun.
Would I do this particular kind of playthrough again? Almost certainly not. However, I could absolutely see myself doing a different forced-job based remix. A forced dragoon and/or summoner could be pretty cool.
I probably wouldn't use Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition as a base hack; at least for me personally, it didn't really do much to enhance the game for me, it introduced a few problems and I don't agree with all of the translation choices. That said, I'm glad I tried it and there were aspects I found interesting.
The next "Classic Jobs" run in the Final Fantasy series: Final Fantasy VII
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy Tactics
