Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part VII

We finished with these last two sessions on September 30th. I guess since it was two sessions I'll break up the description here, too.

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We started with Bahamut's cave. We had very little to gain here; Bahamut doesn't actually do anything for us. The only treasures to find contain Genji equipment, some of which is a minor upgrade for Cecil and some of which isn't an upgrade at all. So really, this was about getting a few levels, or possibly a very improbable chance of getting a rare drop like a Ribbon or something.

The forced Behemoth battles were interesting to me as a casual player when I was young, but when you realize that they are basically just physical slugfests where the only real danger is counter-attacks, you can be more intentional about it. I tried involving Thief and even Palom in the first, but I realized Cecil's damage eclipses them so much and the counter-attacks were painful enough that it meant it was quite a bit more efficient for Cecil to do the fighting, Porom do the healing as necessary, and the other two just standing around defending and sometimes throwing out items.

It never really felt like there was danger here, which was encouraging for the next part of the playthrough, as these enemies (DarkSages, Selenes, Red Giants in this translation) are pretty consistent through the Lunar Subterrane. However, I was somewhat nervous about Bahamut himself. It turned out that this concern was unfounded; Cecil and Thief berserked themselves, we slowed Bahamut and used Haste on Cecil, and Palom cast some strong spells. Porom was able to get Reflect active on pretty well everyone and then... we killed Bahamut before he even counted down to zero. Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever straight-up won the damage race against Bahamut in this game! Perhaps I generally focus too much on defense rather than offense. It was a decisive victory.


Now, after a short shopping trip for consumables, we were going into the Lunar Subterrane. I didn't remember which of the paths were which, and it ended up that the very first path I picked was the one that went to Pale Dim/White Dragon and what would normally be the Murasame. The main gimmick of this fight is that he uses Slow on the team in response to... almost everything. I reasoned that it wouldn't be worth it to try applying Haste, but I still made Cecil berserk and had him carry the team. His speed definitely was suffering by the end of the fight, which served little purpose other than making it a bit more boring. It wasn't bad.

Then the text afterward says, "Received [katana]Murasame!". This turned out to be a lie; I had replaced the Murasame with some kind of special endgame gear. It's funny that this message is hardcoded rather than referencing an actual equipment index. What we actually got was a throwing weapon called Risesun.

This Rising Sun is one of those items I added into this hack to make Thief marginally more endgame viable, but it's based on other FF4-world equipment. This one is based on FF4 Advance (85 attack, 35 accuracy, +10 agility) rather than FF4 The After Years (50 attack, 50 accuracy, +10 agility). This makes it Thief's best weapon, but certainly not gamebreaking since in its source games it was meant to be dual-wielded. Edge would still normally be substantially stronger than Thief is right now.

We proceeded through the Subterrane, fighting nearly all battles. As we picked up Dragon armor that Kain would normally use, I gave everything other than the shield to Cecil, getting rid of the Genji equipment that I had only recently acquired. I fought all of the monsters in chests for the Crystal equipment - mostly quickly replacing the Dragon equipment. As this started to happen, I noticed the turn order changing. I am legitimately unsure of what piece of equipment resulted in a speed differential that seemed to be between Cecil and Porom, but it didn't matter much. While I was investigating, I took some new status pictures.
 
 

Our equipped stats were changing throughout this dungeon, with Porom being affected by getting a new staff or two, and Palom switching from the Triton Dagger to the Stardust Rod, among other things. Shortly after taking those status images, we gained level 48 which resulted in some spells being learned.

For this hack, I had modified Palom and Porom's spell learning lists to always take the fastest learn rate for those characters... in other words, Palom learns each black magic spell at the earliest level they are learned among Palom and Rydia in all official versions of FF4, and Porom learns each white magic spell at the earliest level they are learned among Rosa, Porom and Cecil in all official versions of FF4. This explains the slightly accelerated spell learning. With that, Palom only has Flare and Meteor left to learn!

After the last piece of Crystal equipment, I found myself running short of time and made a beeline for the bottom save point, fleeing from the rest of the battles. When I saved, the party stats looked like this:

Next up: a bunch of hard enemies guarding treasure, and then the final boss.

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Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part VIII

This is the final session for this playthrough! It was played on September 30th.

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This segment started from the final save point in the Lunar Subterrane. Immediately, I went to take an attempt at Plague. Actually, it ended being about five attempts. I tried various strategies, but I found that my usual "Berserk Cecil and watch him destroy everything" wasn't working anymore because of his Crystal Armor... and even then, it didn't seem like we were getting close. However, given that Plague is a flying enemy, Thief was pretty darn strong in this particular battle. Regardless, we couldn't pull out a win here. I decided to check back after getting a couple of other goodies and possibly gaining a few levels in the process.

I've had some trouble with the Lunasaurs in my youth, but my battle with them went relatively smoothly this time. Palom had just learned Meteo, and it seemed worthwhile to use.

This made up for some flubs on my part, like Porom ineffectively casting Berserk on Cecil, who was immune. The Lunasaurs have really strong spells, but we managed pretty well here, all things considered. I mean, Thief and Palom were dead at the end of the battle, but other than that, yeah, it went well.

Next, I wandered the route to where I knew the Crystal Sword/Ragnarok would be waiting for me. I hadn't claimed all the chests on the way previously; the best thing that waited for me was a Protect Ring. Maybe partly for symmetry's sake, and partly because Thief is just generally the least valuable party member, I outfitted both Palom and Porom with a Ribbon and Protect Ring each.

In anticipation for my battle with Wyvern/Dark Bahamut, I actually changed Cecil's armor to the Dragon Armor so that he wouldn't be immune to Berserk. We fought him at about level 50/51. He is very strong and fast, and was another boss that I remembered being really strong from playing casually when I was a kid. I started by managing his speed; Thief and Porom used Slow / webs on him twice, and Cecil used a Bacchus on himself to go berserk. After that, Porom was pretty well using Curaga every turn. I realized a while into it - when Dark Bahamut had put Reflect on - that I had a few Light Curtains/Lunar Curtains and that I might benefit from setting up reflect on everyone, so I started to set that up but it didn't end up mattering. It was an oddly stable fight, considering it always seemed like a short, intense damage race to me in the past.
 

Getting Ragnarok is pretty nice! I thought that might legitimately help with Plague. In the short term, I was also appreciating Ragnarok's crazy damage bonus against undead enemies.


On this trip, Palom also reached level 52 and learned his final spell.


All these factors contributed to my next battle with Plague going considerably better. With that, we won the Nirvana Staff for Porom, which she could gain from the Lunar Ruins in Final Fantasy IV Advance. It's good, but hardly some grand difference-maker.

We went a little deeper into the Subterrane and reached the battle with Ogopogo, who talks like this:

Someone on the Project II team must not understand Canadian dialect.

Ogopogo, like Wyvern/Dark Bahamut, is a real onslaught. He is very fast, and often uses strong attacks. Besides attempting to even the odds by managing our relative speeds, Porom was mostly on healing duty throughout. Thief threw some X-Potions, too, which was particularly necessitated since Ogopogo counters black magic with Tornado. Palom's Thundaga spells were doing just over 5000 damage. Thief went down at one point and getting recovered after that resulted in a close call for the entire party, but Porom managed to bail us out.
 
With that, the game told us we earned the Masamune but we actually gained Asura's Rod for Palom. This offers fairly good stat boosts even compared to the Stardust Rod, and has a considerably stronger itemcast of the Holy spell. It was useful a few times.


We walked back to the last save point to recover and save after that fairly tough battle, and then went back toward the endboss. These battles weren't too hard, although I started running from Evilmasks after a while just because they felt like they took a particularly long time. We had one battle with Zemus' Mind, which I've never really had trouble with before as far as I remember, but it was awful. After the entire party got confused a dozen or so times I ended up just running away.

Then we got to the final boss, with stats as follows:
 
 

The cutscene played out as normal, though we ended up with a bit of a surprise when the scripted battle with Zemus began:

I... have absolutely no idea why Cid showed up in place of FuSoYa on the moon with Golbez in this battle. It's not something I did, at least not intentionally. I assume it's got something to do with a shared character slot or something. It turns out he's rather adept at white magic?

The rest was fine. I kind of thought there was a chance the spectral party members' encouragement would make issues for us, but it didn't. My team's fight with Zeromus was okay; I guess I forgot that true Zeromus' shake animation was a telegraph of Big Bang, which meant I ended up taking a few risks I shouldn't have. I also realized Palom's offensive spells and some itemcasts Thief used triggered Flare counters, but I chose to do it anyway several times.

I actually remembered that Meteo triggered some kind of awful counter, but I didn't remember what it was and I figured it was probably just a counter-Flare like the other spells cause. So, on exactly one occasion, I used Meteo.

This turned out to be a mistake. Zeromus counters this with Tornado, which has nasty and predictable results when Big Bang's HP draining attack is in play. Porom's healing was rather invaluable here. Besides the counters, there really wasn't any amazing threat to this battle, and we pulled through pretty well. We didn't even end up slinging any of the 13 or so Elixirs I had saved for the occasion.


And with that, although there were a few other minor changes in play, we have beaten Final Fantasy IV using a classic-styled party of knight, thief, white mage, black mage. As I remarked aloud at the end, this was one of the most consistently fun playthroughs I've done in this series. The beginning was rather slow, but other than that it's quite interesting to see how this game is relatively balanced for a more typical 4-person party.

Is there meaning in this? I don't know. Perhaps we'll know one day if I and/or someone else creates a straight up "choose your jobs" hack for this game, which I would love. That ought to be a thing.

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The next "Classic Jobs" run in the Final Fantasy series: Final Fantasy V

The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy VII