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Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part VI
Aug. 30th, 2023 11:11 pmIn this session we did things through the Giant of Babil, with a bit extra.
We started on the lunar surface for the first time. I opted to skip Bahamut's Lair reasoning that the battle would be tough, Bahamut himself offers no benefit to this team, and the only treasure I was expecting was the Genji Armor which isn't that much of an upgrade for Cecil. Thus, my intent was to rush to the palace and meet FuSoYa, then leave and return to our planet.
The fights were a bit tough at times, though. In most, Palom was the MVP, at least offense-wise. Enemies were pretty strong with normal attacks that did plenty of damage even to Cecil, and Thief's damage was lagging badly now, with him having trouble reaching triple-digit damage to many enemies. Palom won a lot of battles with Bio and other strong spells, including often more than one per battle. Sometimes his Triton Dagger was also useful.
In the Giant of Babil, I was surprised that the average profile of enemies had shifted; Thief (wielding the FullMoon) had no particular issue dealing a few hundred damage to enemies here. The enemies who use Beam and other non-physical attacks did very poor damage, with the Beams often being completely nullified against my mages... something that I don't remember happening so often in the vanilla game. Perhaps this is because the proportions of my party are different. In any case, it was pretty noticeable.
Both my team and the enemies seemed to have competent offense, but battles didn't often feel way quicker here which I would attribute to higher HP pools. The treasure wasn't noteworthy and none of the battles particularly stood out.
Against the Fiends, I decided we were going to give berserk status to both Cecil and Thief and give them Haste. There's something weird about the way the different fiends are represented as forms in this battle, so I wasn't so eager to use the Slow spell on them figuring it was likely to be cancelled partway through... but I knew Cecil's violence was likely to be able to carry us. His damage against Rubicante was less glorious than it was in our previous battle, instead being about 3000 damage per hit, which is still pretty good considering he is using the non-elemental Defender rather than the Icebrand sword. Thief was there too.
Palom was able to hit weaknesses and do lots of damage. Between this and Cecil's potent strikes this battle never really felt dangerous, despite the risk of having half of my team in an uncontrollable state.
I went directly to the CPU battle, taking a risk by skipping the save before the next (and last!) vanilla party shift. In this fight, using Berserk was not an option, since character in the berserk state target random enemies. I quickly took out the Defender and then targeted the CPU. Palom had pretty close to nothing to contribute, since his only useful spell that can penetrate a Reflect spell are multi-target, and taking out the Attacker isn't generally a good idea. So Palom used physical attacks, too! It wasn't nothing.
We played this battle out using the usual strategy and it went as expected.
After this, we had the option to freely roam the overworld, the underworld, and the lunar surface. While I didn't want to go into the final dungeon at this point, I thought I could do some not-very-useful sidequests. But first, I did the obvious useful sidequest!: getting Excalibur. This brought Cecil's attack from 131 to 188. Huge!
While I was in the underworld, I figured I would beat Asura and Leviathan. This does nothing for me, but it does open up Odin and Bahamut... which also do nothing for me. But it seems like it ought to be part of the experience of playing the game with this team. In vanilla, I would normally do these before the Giant of Babil or in some cases before the Sealed Cave. At this point they were easy. With Reflect on Asura and Berserk on Cecil, we trounced her.
And then we went into the Leviathan battle without a break! It was a bit harder, actually, since Tsunami is quite a strong attack. However, with a Berserk on Cecil yet again and Palom's strong spells, we defeated Leviathan.
While I was gathering summoning spells for a character that doesn't really exist, I figured I may as well beat Odin, too. I thought there was a chance this wouldn't be so easy, since you'd normally very likely have Edge and Kain with you. Kain could jump for pretty big damage, and Edge could either throw something or use Blitz, and we don't have that. Thief certainly couldn't bring much to the table. Porom tried to set up the speed differential while Cecil went berserk and attacked. I think this was close; I am glad Palom got off this Thundaga spell when he did.
The Blue Planet doesn't really have much else for us; I parked the ship outside of Bahamut's Lair, which I'll do next time before going deep below the moon's surface for goodies and/or to save the world. I snapped pictures of our current stats before wrapping up.
We started on the lunar surface for the first time. I opted to skip Bahamut's Lair reasoning that the battle would be tough, Bahamut himself offers no benefit to this team, and the only treasure I was expecting was the Genji Armor which isn't that much of an upgrade for Cecil. Thus, my intent was to rush to the palace and meet FuSoYa, then leave and return to our planet.
The fights were a bit tough at times, though. In most, Palom was the MVP, at least offense-wise. Enemies were pretty strong with normal attacks that did plenty of damage even to Cecil, and Thief's damage was lagging badly now, with him having trouble reaching triple-digit damage to many enemies. Palom won a lot of battles with Bio and other strong spells, including often more than one per battle. Sometimes his Triton Dagger was also useful.
In the Giant of Babil, I was surprised that the average profile of enemies had shifted; Thief (wielding the FullMoon) had no particular issue dealing a few hundred damage to enemies here. The enemies who use Beam and other non-physical attacks did very poor damage, with the Beams often being completely nullified against my mages... something that I don't remember happening so often in the vanilla game. Perhaps this is because the proportions of my party are different. In any case, it was pretty noticeable.
Both my team and the enemies seemed to have competent offense, but battles didn't often feel way quicker here which I would attribute to higher HP pools. The treasure wasn't noteworthy and none of the battles particularly stood out.
Against the Fiends, I decided we were going to give berserk status to both Cecil and Thief and give them Haste. There's something weird about the way the different fiends are represented as forms in this battle, so I wasn't so eager to use the Slow spell on them figuring it was likely to be cancelled partway through... but I knew Cecil's violence was likely to be able to carry us. His damage against Rubicante was less glorious than it was in our previous battle, instead being about 3000 damage per hit, which is still pretty good considering he is using the non-elemental Defender rather than the Icebrand sword. Thief was there too.
Palom was able to hit weaknesses and do lots of damage. Between this and Cecil's potent strikes this battle never really felt dangerous, despite the risk of having half of my team in an uncontrollable state.
I went directly to the CPU battle, taking a risk by skipping the save before the next (and last!) vanilla party shift. In this fight, using Berserk was not an option, since character in the berserk state target random enemies. I quickly took out the Defender and then targeted the CPU. Palom had pretty close to nothing to contribute, since his only useful spell that can penetrate a Reflect spell are multi-target, and taking out the Attacker isn't generally a good idea. So Palom used physical attacks, too! It wasn't nothing.
We played this battle out using the usual strategy and it went as expected.
After this, we had the option to freely roam the overworld, the underworld, and the lunar surface. While I didn't want to go into the final dungeon at this point, I thought I could do some not-very-useful sidequests. But first, I did the obvious useful sidequest!: getting Excalibur. This brought Cecil's attack from 131 to 188. Huge!
While I was in the underworld, I figured I would beat Asura and Leviathan. This does nothing for me, but it does open up Odin and Bahamut... which also do nothing for me. But it seems like it ought to be part of the experience of playing the game with this team. In vanilla, I would normally do these before the Giant of Babil or in some cases before the Sealed Cave. At this point they were easy. With Reflect on Asura and Berserk on Cecil, we trounced her.
And then we went into the Leviathan battle without a break! It was a bit harder, actually, since Tsunami is quite a strong attack. However, with a Berserk on Cecil yet again and Palom's strong spells, we defeated Leviathan.
While I was gathering summoning spells for a character that doesn't really exist, I figured I may as well beat Odin, too. I thought there was a chance this wouldn't be so easy, since you'd normally very likely have Edge and Kain with you. Kain could jump for pretty big damage, and Edge could either throw something or use Blitz, and we don't have that. Thief certainly couldn't bring much to the table. Porom tried to set up the speed differential while Cecil went berserk and attacked. I think this was close; I am glad Palom got off this Thundaga spell when he did.
The Blue Planet doesn't really have much else for us; I parked the ship outside of Bahamut's Lair, which I'll do next time before going deep below the moon's surface for goodies and/or to save the world. I snapped pictures of our current stats before wrapping up.
