Shining Force Minimum Party Part VII
Jul. 11th, 2023 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingHere is the epic conclusion of this minimum party playthrough that was begun in 2017. Perhaps I'll un-abandon another unfinished run sometime soon.
Really, the epicness of this conclusion is questionable. The battles don't go particularly well.
The Colossus battle was tough! I am not sure if perhaps my intentionally sub-optimal 11-person party is a bit underlevelled, but taking on those Chimaeras at the beginning was tough. In the first couple of rounds, things went pretty badly. It may have partly been because of bad positioning, but I definitely also had a ton of missed attacks against Chimaeras. The other thing that was kind of stupid that took me ages to realize (27 minutes in) is that Balbaroy didn't have his new Doom Blade equipped and was just air-punching the enemies.
Again, I don't know the mechanics of this game super deeply. I believe there's both some kind of hit rate formula that uses the agility stat as well as a flag that indicates an enemy's evasion level that's some kind of innate, immutable evasion. I could be wrong about how it works, but regardless it was sort of absurd how many great attackers whiffed terribly against the Chimaeras.
This first battle, which was going terribly even in its first turn, still served a purpose in that I learned which enemies would approach in the first few turns and which ones would end up holding still. For example, I was able to learn that the left-side Chimaeras were the biggest immediate threat and that the Armed Skeletons and Horsemen who appeared a bit north of the starting position pretty much just stand their ground.
There's a point in the video around the 8:50 mark where Pelle misses - about my fourth consecutive miss against Chimaeras - where I throw my arms in the air and say, "What on Earth is happening?! Did we not beat a whole bunch of these guys in the previous battle? I want a do-over strictly for the statistical interest in, like, how this could play out differently, you know?". I stated a plan to re-start the battle on Faris' next turn just because it was going badly, when 20 seconds later this happened:
We defeated zero enemies in this first attempt.
As I said, the second attempt was informed somewhat by the first. I moved up a bit slower and prepared for the Chimaeras coming in from the left. I also used more AoE spells and itemcasts so as to bypass the Chimaera's evasion a couple of times. In fact, between better luck and using fewer evadable attacks, we got one Chimaera down early in turn 2.
Bleu died on turn 2 from a Blue Dragon's ice breath. I noted that Bleu has had awful stat gains since promotion and really hasn't been able to contribute. Bleu losing was something I could accept, but a bit later, with the battle generally going fairly well, this happened:
And that's just absurd. Earnest with the Valkyrie and Evil Ring is a really strong unit, but when a critical attack can land that much damage it's just not something you can account for with tactics. It was not a good feeling. I had bee considering using a Shower of Cure item but once Earnest was gone there's less impact of a mass-heal and, for that matter, less chance I was actually going to win regardless. In fact, the mere idea of Faris being able to be wrecked randomly regardless of what I do really makes the game seem awfully luck-based.
Unfortunately, Earnest's position was the main thing holding the other three Chimaeras back from Faris.
Third try! Bleu and Earnest are back. Once again, mostly keeping the team tightly bunched together, even moreso than attempt 2. The first wave of Chimaeras actually went pretty well, and we defeated them without any casualties.
Alef gained level 20 after casting spells on the second wave of Chimaeras, and I identified that Torasu was going to get level 20 after two more uses of Heal. What got really silly is that Torasu cast Shield on Faris (for 1 experience) and I didn't realize the Shield spell nullified curative spells, too. Thus, twice we tried to heal Faris only to find it ineffective. Consequently, it took a bit of extra time for Torasu to reach level 20. But it happened!
Adam is now the only one unpromoted and still quite far from level 20, naturally. Still, every so often he finds a way to help, like this:
And that was against a Chimaera! Pretty impressive.
We had everyone alive with all of the enemies defeated besides the three Colossus heads. We went left first, and found that this was the Freeze-using head. We were able to gang up on it and only take two Freeze spells. We had exhausted Alef and Torasu's MP pretty much completely by the time we were gathering the force on the right head side to face the Blaze head on the right. Alef did end up using her last 2 MP to cast her own Blaze spell on the head for a few damage, and we took it out while only being targetted by a single Blaze spell.
We took the awkward right-side path to get to the top head, which uses Bolt spells. I actually thought it started moving after the other two heads were defeated but it turns out it only starts moving when your units move into a certain range. I didn't even let Faris get close to it. I kept units scattered until it got somewhat close so that it wouldn't be able to mass-target us too effectively. When we got closer with intent to attack it, naturally we were more able to be mass-targetted.
However, we were able to beat it before its next turn. No casualties!
I went back to town to fix some items and to promote Alef and Torasu.
Then we began the final two battles: Battle 29 vs. Darksol followed by battle 30 vs. Dark Dragon. If you lose during battle 30, you need to repeat battle 29.
I had immaculate strategy during battle 29. I realized pretty quickly that the arena is specifically set up to allow the Torch Eyes to attack you at range as you move through the middle toward Darksol, so I made a plan to wait outside of the central corridor until after the Torch Eyes had both move through and take those out. Torch Eyes are pretty weak enemies at this point, but ~20 defense-piercing damage is never something to be ignored.
It seemed pretty great that nobody had taken a point of damage by this point, and with this favourable positioning.
Besides taking out the enemies on the side of the corridor, I was able to take out Darksol quickly and with little issue. The only casualty was Alef, who I accidentally left open to a single Steel Claw attack. As a level 1 promoted WZRD, that was enough.
We beat Darksol and rolled into the final battle. I had a pretty good setup going, with centaurs managing Armed Skeletons on the left and birdfolk managing the right while the others went around attacking heads. Given that I was subjected to quite a few attacks, especially Demon Blaze attacks, I didn't expect to see Bolt 4 here. Unfortunately, this was the context in which I saw it:
For the second time in this update, there was 55 damage from a completely unexpected source that utterly wrecked the battle! Crap.
So now we're repeating battle 29 and then doing battle 30 again.
The good news is battle 29 really had gone well. I had a good approach to it and it didn't feel especially challenging. Even Darksol himself seems to pick pretty stupid attacks sometimes, like a 1 damage physical attack when he's being assaulted from all sides.
One thing I noted here is that while my force wasn't particularly high-levelled, some of the higher-levelled members like Mae and Amon were now level 25+, and that was starting to seem more like the way a very over-prepared person would play. Well, it was an accident. Most enemies were still giving good experience, including those infinitely-respawning Armed Skeletons in battle 30.
This time, we beat battle 29 with all members alive. We actually blocked the tiles that the Armed Skeletons appear from in battle 30 this time, at first using Adam and Bleu who probably have the least to offer at this point.
Things were going great. I had the left head down, the middle head was almost defeated, and my units were healthy. Then, for some reason, this happened:
I had no idea Bolt 4 could reach that far! It was a bit mystifying that it was capable of doing this every turn so far but hadn't. In a way, I guess this was kind of like good strategy on Dark Dragon's part, really, since Adam was the only unit over there and the one preventing Armed Skeletons from spawning.
I sort of threw caution to the wind to throw the big attacks at the final head quickly. Then the head got stupid. For some reason on its final two turns it cast Freeze 2 on Faris for damage in the 10-20 range. Really not scary.
It was Alef who - with vengeance! - struck down Dark Dragon with an attack I didn't expect to do so much damage.
The only one down on my team was Adam, and we won with just 11 members of the force ever having been recruited. And on a run started 6 years ago! That's pretty unusual. But I'm quite glad not to play the beginning of this playthrough again because it was tough.
The ending of the game ends up being pretty amazing. A whole bunch of people who never joined at all - most of whom you never even met - show up wondering where Faris is. I remarked, this is really the evidence that this style of playthrough and the oversight that allows it is very much, well, an oversight. Everything else just works with this tiny team of characters.
This is a great variant run. Certainly I'd recommend it to a fan of this game. It's a good way to see what it's like to play with few characters at the start of the game, and a good way to try and find the merits in others (like, uh, Adam?) in late game.
To me personally, the big thing it meant was seeing how amazing Amon and Balbaroy could be. Those are not characters I've ever used in late game before, but they can be very strong. I kind of thought Adam might end up being kind of neat too, but at least without a concerted levelling effort that was decidedly not the case.
Really, the epicness of this conclusion is questionable. The battles don't go particularly well.
The Colossus battle was tough! I am not sure if perhaps my intentionally sub-optimal 11-person party is a bit underlevelled, but taking on those Chimaeras at the beginning was tough. In the first couple of rounds, things went pretty badly. It may have partly been because of bad positioning, but I definitely also had a ton of missed attacks against Chimaeras. The other thing that was kind of stupid that took me ages to realize (27 minutes in) is that Balbaroy didn't have his new Doom Blade equipped and was just air-punching the enemies.
Again, I don't know the mechanics of this game super deeply. I believe there's both some kind of hit rate formula that uses the agility stat as well as a flag that indicates an enemy's evasion level that's some kind of innate, immutable evasion. I could be wrong about how it works, but regardless it was sort of absurd how many great attackers whiffed terribly against the Chimaeras.
This first battle, which was going terribly even in its first turn, still served a purpose in that I learned which enemies would approach in the first few turns and which ones would end up holding still. For example, I was able to learn that the left-side Chimaeras were the biggest immediate threat and that the Armed Skeletons and Horsemen who appeared a bit north of the starting position pretty much just stand their ground.
There's a point in the video around the 8:50 mark where Pelle misses - about my fourth consecutive miss against Chimaeras - where I throw my arms in the air and say, "What on Earth is happening?! Did we not beat a whole bunch of these guys in the previous battle? I want a do-over strictly for the statistical interest in, like, how this could play out differently, you know?". I stated a plan to re-start the battle on Faris' next turn just because it was going badly, when 20 seconds later this happened:
We defeated zero enemies in this first attempt.
As I said, the second attempt was informed somewhat by the first. I moved up a bit slower and prepared for the Chimaeras coming in from the left. I also used more AoE spells and itemcasts so as to bypass the Chimaera's evasion a couple of times. In fact, between better luck and using fewer evadable attacks, we got one Chimaera down early in turn 2.
Bleu died on turn 2 from a Blue Dragon's ice breath. I noted that Bleu has had awful stat gains since promotion and really hasn't been able to contribute. Bleu losing was something I could accept, but a bit later, with the battle generally going fairly well, this happened:
And that's just absurd. Earnest with the Valkyrie and Evil Ring is a really strong unit, but when a critical attack can land that much damage it's just not something you can account for with tactics. It was not a good feeling. I had bee considering using a Shower of Cure item but once Earnest was gone there's less impact of a mass-heal and, for that matter, less chance I was actually going to win regardless. In fact, the mere idea of Faris being able to be wrecked randomly regardless of what I do really makes the game seem awfully luck-based.
Unfortunately, Earnest's position was the main thing holding the other three Chimaeras back from Faris.
Third try! Bleu and Earnest are back. Once again, mostly keeping the team tightly bunched together, even moreso than attempt 2. The first wave of Chimaeras actually went pretty well, and we defeated them without any casualties.
Alef gained level 20 after casting spells on the second wave of Chimaeras, and I identified that Torasu was going to get level 20 after two more uses of Heal. What got really silly is that Torasu cast Shield on Faris (for 1 experience) and I didn't realize the Shield spell nullified curative spells, too. Thus, twice we tried to heal Faris only to find it ineffective. Consequently, it took a bit of extra time for Torasu to reach level 20. But it happened!
Adam is now the only one unpromoted and still quite far from level 20, naturally. Still, every so often he finds a way to help, like this:
And that was against a Chimaera! Pretty impressive.
We had everyone alive with all of the enemies defeated besides the three Colossus heads. We went left first, and found that this was the Freeze-using head. We were able to gang up on it and only take two Freeze spells. We had exhausted Alef and Torasu's MP pretty much completely by the time we were gathering the force on the right head side to face the Blaze head on the right. Alef did end up using her last 2 MP to cast her own Blaze spell on the head for a few damage, and we took it out while only being targetted by a single Blaze spell.
We took the awkward right-side path to get to the top head, which uses Bolt spells. I actually thought it started moving after the other two heads were defeated but it turns out it only starts moving when your units move into a certain range. I didn't even let Faris get close to it. I kept units scattered until it got somewhat close so that it wouldn't be able to mass-target us too effectively. When we got closer with intent to attack it, naturally we were more able to be mass-targetted.
However, we were able to beat it before its next turn. No casualties!
I went back to town to fix some items and to promote Alef and Torasu.
Then we began the final two battles: Battle 29 vs. Darksol followed by battle 30 vs. Dark Dragon. If you lose during battle 30, you need to repeat battle 29.
I had immaculate strategy during battle 29. I realized pretty quickly that the arena is specifically set up to allow the Torch Eyes to attack you at range as you move through the middle toward Darksol, so I made a plan to wait outside of the central corridor until after the Torch Eyes had both move through and take those out. Torch Eyes are pretty weak enemies at this point, but ~20 defense-piercing damage is never something to be ignored.
It seemed pretty great that nobody had taken a point of damage by this point, and with this favourable positioning.
Besides taking out the enemies on the side of the corridor, I was able to take out Darksol quickly and with little issue. The only casualty was Alef, who I accidentally left open to a single Steel Claw attack. As a level 1 promoted WZRD, that was enough.
We beat Darksol and rolled into the final battle. I had a pretty good setup going, with centaurs managing Armed Skeletons on the left and birdfolk managing the right while the others went around attacking heads. Given that I was subjected to quite a few attacks, especially Demon Blaze attacks, I didn't expect to see Bolt 4 here. Unfortunately, this was the context in which I saw it:
For the second time in this update, there was 55 damage from a completely unexpected source that utterly wrecked the battle! Crap.
So now we're repeating battle 29 and then doing battle 30 again.
The good news is battle 29 really had gone well. I had a good approach to it and it didn't feel especially challenging. Even Darksol himself seems to pick pretty stupid attacks sometimes, like a 1 damage physical attack when he's being assaulted from all sides.
One thing I noted here is that while my force wasn't particularly high-levelled, some of the higher-levelled members like Mae and Amon were now level 25+, and that was starting to seem more like the way a very over-prepared person would play. Well, it was an accident. Most enemies were still giving good experience, including those infinitely-respawning Armed Skeletons in battle 30.
This time, we beat battle 29 with all members alive. We actually blocked the tiles that the Armed Skeletons appear from in battle 30 this time, at first using Adam and Bleu who probably have the least to offer at this point.
Things were going great. I had the left head down, the middle head was almost defeated, and my units were healthy. Then, for some reason, this happened:
I had no idea Bolt 4 could reach that far! It was a bit mystifying that it was capable of doing this every turn so far but hadn't. In a way, I guess this was kind of like good strategy on Dark Dragon's part, really, since Adam was the only unit over there and the one preventing Armed Skeletons from spawning.
I sort of threw caution to the wind to throw the big attacks at the final head quickly. Then the head got stupid. For some reason on its final two turns it cast Freeze 2 on Faris for damage in the 10-20 range. Really not scary.
It was Alef who - with vengeance! - struck down Dark Dragon with an attack I didn't expect to do so much damage.
The only one down on my team was Adam, and we won with just 11 members of the force ever having been recruited. And on a run started 6 years ago! That's pretty unusual. But I'm quite glad not to play the beginning of this playthrough again because it was tough.
The ending of the game ends up being pretty amazing. A whole bunch of people who never joined at all - most of whom you never even met - show up wondering where Faris is. I remarked, this is really the evidence that this style of playthrough and the oversight that allows it is very much, well, an oversight. Everything else just works with this tiny team of characters.
This is a great variant run. Certainly I'd recommend it to a fan of this game. It's a good way to see what it's like to play with few characters at the start of the game, and a good way to try and find the merits in others (like, uh, Adam?) in late game.
To me personally, the big thing it meant was seeing how amazing Amon and Balbaroy could be. Those are not characters I've ever used in late game before, but they can be very strong. I kind of thought Adam might end up being kind of neat too, but at least without a concerted levelling effort that was decidedly not the case.
