Shining Force Minimum Party Part VI
Jul. 9th, 2023 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingIn this session, I played battles 24 through 27, making this very likely the second-last update for this playthrough. Probably. Maybe.
I was joined by one of my kids for the start of the stream as well, and he was completely unfamiliar with this game so there was a ground-level explanation of several aspects of this game and this variant playthrough at the beginning.
Battle 24: At the beginning, I was introducing the team to my son. My favourite part of this was when I was starting to say that Adam was awful my son said, "He looks awful; his head has come off!".
Maybe his abysmal stats aren't his worst problem.
This battle went okay. I finally had access to a mage with area-of-effect attacks (and every so often I remember to use itemcast effects, too), and the Demon Masters enemies had some as well, so there was a lot of clustered attacks and healing. Despite some effective Auras, Torasu died pretty early in his very first battle. Alef was the next one to go down, from an Ice Worm who attacked her from full health.
The next exciting thing that happened, besides some pretty good banter with my kid, was Bleu defeating a Minotaur and earning level 20!
Earnest ended up taking out Chaos. Everyone other than Torasu and Alef survived, even Adam.
After this, we were able to use the Swords of Light and Darkness to get the Chaos Breaker.
My son very intelligently observed after the Chaos Breaker appeared that I should go to the other altars to re-claim the Sword of Light and the Sword of Darkness. I don't remember whether that's a thing or not but I wish I did; I wandered out of that room and after getting the Chaos Breaker there's no way back. Balbaroy and Amon really might've benefitted from those swords?
Is grabbing the Sword of Light after the Chaos Breaker a thing? I resolved to look this up but I haven't yet. I'm guessing "no" but it only sort of matters, and I can't go back now anyway.
Battle 25: This battle introduces Horsemen (which is a dumb name) and Armed Skeletons, both of whom are pretty powerful and have some range. It also begins with terrain that's very unfriendly to centaurs, making it pretty hard for the party to stay clustered together. I could try to have Amon, Balbaroy and Bleu do most of the fighting, but I think they would get destroyed (especially the recently-promoted Bleu with his 25 HP).
The battle was going okay, but Balbaroy got defeated by a combination of Cerberus and a strong attack from one Horseman. A while later, I moved Faris into what I thought was an okay spot, but it was a bit too vulnerable in the face of strong ranged attacks from Horsemen.
With Faris at the south edge of the forest, the Horsemen and Armed Skeletons were able to close in and wreck him within a few attacks, even though there were only a few enemies left. I had to repeat the battle.
Unfortunately, almost immediately after we restarted, my son lost interest and left. Oh well. The first hour of the video was pretty entertaining.
Something we discussed, and anecdotally it is true, is that in this playthrough, Balbaroy is strong but dies a lot. And after Balbaroy dies, Amon starts getting criticals, tanking hits, and earning awesome stat gains. I am pretty much certain that there isn't some hidden "spousal vengeance" modifier coded into this game but it has sure felt that way.
One thing that occurred to me in this battle, given Adam's penchant for doing 1 damage, was that I could activate the Power Ring on Adam for an additional temporary attack boost. This did allow Adam to contribute somewhat. Although the Power Ring's Boost effect wore off after one action.
Alef got defeated by a Horseman in one shot, but otherwise this battle generally seemed better-managed. After this, there was a turn where Torasu had no useful Heal targets, so he attacked a Horseman and did 13 damage. Hm. More evidence of the hidden vengeance modifier?
Adam also managed to get an attack off on a Dark Priest after his Boost had ended, and it went like this:
It kind of made me wonder if the Boost effect was accidentally permanent or something like that. The idea lingered in the back of my mind. Was this a thing? I feel like it may be a thing. This one I did look up later and it does seem that there's a known bug related to the Boost effect not ending.
Anyway, the rest of this battle went okay, with Alef as the only casualty this time. Earnest once again ended it.
We entered Runefaust and everyone was happy there. Odd.
Battle 26: We entered the Runefaust Castle and we had to face King Ramladu, who was being controlled by Darksol. I immedately felt like the HP values of the new Chimaera and Blue Dragon enemies were indicative of a pretty large step up in difficulty, but we did this battle in one try. The Chimaeras at the start were absolutely the hardest part, actually. Adam died against the Chimaeras, but everyone else pulled through. They took lots of damage, but we had two reasonable healers now so we managed.
We found an additional Halberd in a chest that we passed off to Mae during the battle, so all three of my active centaurs had some kind of more-potent equipment option.
Somehow, the cluster of Cerberuses (Cerberi?) on the left and Armed Skeletons on the right didn't end up noticing at all while I procured treasures and then carefully positioned my team in front of the Blue Dragons and Horsemen to take them out quite quickly.
We started the assault by going immediately for the Horsemen, who have low HP and defense but nasty attacks with huge range. The blue hexagon spaces in this map are an interesting this because even flying units can't move over them, but this didn't work against us too much. The part of the fight where we battled the Blue Dragons actually went pretty well, and then we just had to mop up the fellas on the side.
Once again, I watched the turn order carefully to act immediately after the Armed Skeletons to send my entire team after them with low risk. It went well. This rolls immediately into the next battle.
Battle 28 vs. King Ramladu: This battle was crazy. The robots went really fast and just tore through the units I left behind, and I moved Faris and a couple of other units to the top of the map to fight the king. I didn't expect him to crush Faris in a single action, but that's pretty well exactly what happened!
Okay, that sucked. The good news that I wasn't aware of is that you get to restart the battle from this point when you re-enter it. The even better news is I bothered to check the "deals" section at the shop and found that the weapon store had two Doom Blades for sale for some reason that I was able to buy to get Amon and Balbaroy a little weapon upgrade. The even more betterer thing is that I could revive Adam! Just kidding, that didn't matter.
On the next attempt, we mostly ignored the robots and moved most of the team up to deal with King Ramladu. We kept Faris out of the way. Some characters who had AoE options did use them on robots where possible, but I wasn't really trying to beat the robots; a large part of the team still got destroyed before they could get close to the king after all, including Alef, Torasu, Adam, Bleu and almost Khris.
The funny thing is that Ramladu still got a hit in on Faris due to my carelessness, but thankfully it was only 41 damage this time. Faris himself took down Ramladu immediately after.
We're heading into the real endgame now.
I was joined by one of my kids for the start of the stream as well, and he was completely unfamiliar with this game so there was a ground-level explanation of several aspects of this game and this variant playthrough at the beginning.
Battle 24: At the beginning, I was introducing the team to my son. My favourite part of this was when I was starting to say that Adam was awful my son said, "He looks awful; his head has come off!".
Maybe his abysmal stats aren't his worst problem.
This battle went okay. I finally had access to a mage with area-of-effect attacks (and every so often I remember to use itemcast effects, too), and the Demon Masters enemies had some as well, so there was a lot of clustered attacks and healing. Despite some effective Auras, Torasu died pretty early in his very first battle. Alef was the next one to go down, from an Ice Worm who attacked her from full health.
The next exciting thing that happened, besides some pretty good banter with my kid, was Bleu defeating a Minotaur and earning level 20!
Earnest ended up taking out Chaos. Everyone other than Torasu and Alef survived, even Adam.
After this, we were able to use the Swords of Light and Darkness to get the Chaos Breaker.
My son very intelligently observed after the Chaos Breaker appeared that I should go to the other altars to re-claim the Sword of Light and the Sword of Darkness. I don't remember whether that's a thing or not but I wish I did; I wandered out of that room and after getting the Chaos Breaker there's no way back. Balbaroy and Amon really might've benefitted from those swords?
Is grabbing the Sword of Light after the Chaos Breaker a thing? I resolved to look this up but I haven't yet. I'm guessing "no" but it only sort of matters, and I can't go back now anyway.
Battle 25: This battle introduces Horsemen (which is a dumb name) and Armed Skeletons, both of whom are pretty powerful and have some range. It also begins with terrain that's very unfriendly to centaurs, making it pretty hard for the party to stay clustered together. I could try to have Amon, Balbaroy and Bleu do most of the fighting, but I think they would get destroyed (especially the recently-promoted Bleu with his 25 HP).
The battle was going okay, but Balbaroy got defeated by a combination of Cerberus and a strong attack from one Horseman. A while later, I moved Faris into what I thought was an okay spot, but it was a bit too vulnerable in the face of strong ranged attacks from Horsemen.
With Faris at the south edge of the forest, the Horsemen and Armed Skeletons were able to close in and wreck him within a few attacks, even though there were only a few enemies left. I had to repeat the battle.
Unfortunately, almost immediately after we restarted, my son lost interest and left. Oh well. The first hour of the video was pretty entertaining.
Something we discussed, and anecdotally it is true, is that in this playthrough, Balbaroy is strong but dies a lot. And after Balbaroy dies, Amon starts getting criticals, tanking hits, and earning awesome stat gains. I am pretty much certain that there isn't some hidden "spousal vengeance" modifier coded into this game but it has sure felt that way.
One thing that occurred to me in this battle, given Adam's penchant for doing 1 damage, was that I could activate the Power Ring on Adam for an additional temporary attack boost. This did allow Adam to contribute somewhat. Although the Power Ring's Boost effect wore off after one action.
Alef got defeated by a Horseman in one shot, but otherwise this battle generally seemed better-managed. After this, there was a turn where Torasu had no useful Heal targets, so he attacked a Horseman and did 13 damage. Hm. More evidence of the hidden vengeance modifier?
Adam also managed to get an attack off on a Dark Priest after his Boost had ended, and it went like this:
It kind of made me wonder if the Boost effect was accidentally permanent or something like that. The idea lingered in the back of my mind. Was this a thing? I feel like it may be a thing. This one I did look up later and it does seem that there's a known bug related to the Boost effect not ending.
Anyway, the rest of this battle went okay, with Alef as the only casualty this time. Earnest once again ended it.
We entered Runefaust and everyone was happy there. Odd.
Battle 26: We entered the Runefaust Castle and we had to face King Ramladu, who was being controlled by Darksol. I immedately felt like the HP values of the new Chimaera and Blue Dragon enemies were indicative of a pretty large step up in difficulty, but we did this battle in one try. The Chimaeras at the start were absolutely the hardest part, actually. Adam died against the Chimaeras, but everyone else pulled through. They took lots of damage, but we had two reasonable healers now so we managed.
We found an additional Halberd in a chest that we passed off to Mae during the battle, so all three of my active centaurs had some kind of more-potent equipment option.
Somehow, the cluster of Cerberuses (Cerberi?) on the left and Armed Skeletons on the right didn't end up noticing at all while I procured treasures and then carefully positioned my team in front of the Blue Dragons and Horsemen to take them out quite quickly.
We started the assault by going immediately for the Horsemen, who have low HP and defense but nasty attacks with huge range. The blue hexagon spaces in this map are an interesting this because even flying units can't move over them, but this didn't work against us too much. The part of the fight where we battled the Blue Dragons actually went pretty well, and then we just had to mop up the fellas on the side.
Once again, I watched the turn order carefully to act immediately after the Armed Skeletons to send my entire team after them with low risk. It went well. This rolls immediately into the next battle.
Battle 28 vs. King Ramladu: This battle was crazy. The robots went really fast and just tore through the units I left behind, and I moved Faris and a couple of other units to the top of the map to fight the king. I didn't expect him to crush Faris in a single action, but that's pretty well exactly what happened!
Okay, that sucked. The good news that I wasn't aware of is that you get to restart the battle from this point when you re-enter it. The even better news is I bothered to check the "deals" section at the shop and found that the weapon store had two Doom Blades for sale for some reason that I was able to buy to get Amon and Balbaroy a little weapon upgrade. The even more betterer thing is that I could revive Adam! Just kidding, that didn't matter.
On the next attempt, we mostly ignored the robots and moved most of the team up to deal with King Ramladu. We kept Faris out of the way. Some characters who had AoE options did use them on robots where possible, but I wasn't really trying to beat the robots; a large part of the team still got destroyed before they could get close to the king after all, including Alef, Torasu, Adam, Bleu and almost Khris.
The funny thing is that Ramladu still got a hit in on Faris due to my carelessness, but thankfully it was only 41 damage this time. Faris himself took down Ramladu immediately after.
We're heading into the real endgame now.
