Final Fantasy III Classic Jobs Part X

This session was played on October 23, 2017.

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The intent was to the grindy stuff this day while my kids were napping, so I wasn't going to be playing for particularly long. While I wasn't sure whether I needed to grind experience, I knew I wanted to get the Legendary Smith weapons for at least Refia, Arc and Luneth. I chose to do this in the Ancient Ruins, reasoning that dividing enemies might lend themselves to more combat actions and thus more effective job level gains. I also figured I'd kill Refia to speed things up, since she already has job level 99.

I knew that for most jobs, seven to ten actions in combat will earn characters a job level. I tried to reduce the battles to a single enemy, then just defended and healed to stall a bit, then ended it after a handful of turns. This went on for pretty much an hour; Ingus wailing on Eaters and Azraels while Arc and Luneth guarded. In doing this, we ended up with over 500000 gil, too.

At about the 1 hour 4 minute mark, Luneth got job level 99... so I took off his armor and killed him. Then we went to the Floating Continent to more quickly cruise randomly between towns and got Luneth's Lilith Rod.
 
While it does provide a good attack boost, the intellect boost Luneth gets is pretty substantial compared to his old Wizard Rod.

I couldn't seem to get the Legendary Smith to show up again after this, so I tried restarting the game. Pretty much immediately after that, I was able to find her again. She gave us Refia's weapon.
 
The Gladius gives Refia great attack power. She'll keep the Moonring Blade in her other hand, since it has the same attack power as the Lust Dagger. The Gladius also gives a huge bonus to agility.

The next time I ran into the Legendary Smith, I didn't realize I had Arc sitting at job level 98 instead of 99 (which had been on screen repeatedly, but I overlooked it every time). So I had to gain Arc one job level and then track down the Legendary Smith again. When we did, we got this:
 

It was quite coincidental that with all my wandering - mostly between the Healing Copse and Gysahl - that every time I met her to get a prize it happened to be in the Healing Copse. Anyway, we got lots of goodies. Given that Ingus already has Ultima Weapon and Excalibur, his Legendary Smith prize is probably the least important... but I figured I would do it while I was here. We'll finish that up next time.

I saved at this point and ended for today, with Ingus at knight job level 91.

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Final Fantasy III Classic Jobs Part XI

We're getting close to the end! This session was played on October 25, 2017.

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We're starting pretty much ready for the game's final two areas, and three of our characters - Refia the thief, Arc the white age, and Luneth the black mage - have all attained job level 99 and earned their special Legendary Smith equipment that only exists in the 3D versions of this game. Ingus the knight is starting at level 91 and I figured we may as well get him boosted up so he can have his too... although it probably offers the least benefit considering the excellent weapons he already has. The knight's exclusive weapon, Save the Queen, has the same power as Ragnarok and little difference from Excalibur, but it has slightly different - arguably worse - stat boosts.

At around the 16:30 mark, Ingus hit job level 99. I went and got Save the Queen, but I prefer the stat boosts from Ragnarok. As expected this may have been a litte bit pointless. Well, it does offer a fairly nice Reflect itemcast. Maybe that will come in handy.


Now, back to the endgame areas. In the Syrcus Tower, I started running into some enemies I hadn't seen before that were palette swaps of the bosses in Eureka, like Glasya Labolas and Dark General. Glasya Labolas' confusion attacks worried me, but nothing ended up being too hard.


There were a fair number of treasures in Syrcus Tower, but they were mostly consumables like Phoenix Downs and Elixirs. Those are still useful, but not as exciting as the items I was gaining when I played through Eureka. 

We got to a big mirror, we had friends help us with the power of love, and then we encountered Xande. Our physical attacks were pretty darn potent here, especially when Arc used a Rune Staff itemcast for the Erase effect to remove Xande's Protect buff. With Xande unprotected and Ingus hasted, Ingus actually landed a 9999 attack on him.

He was defeated pretty quickly after that; it was perhaps 5 or 6 turns.

We suffered our plot-based loss to the Cloud of Darkness after this. It was a dramatic one; her lightning attack wrecked Refia pretty badly. With that, we entered the very small-sized World of Darkness and its wide variety of palette-swapped bosses.

We opened a box containing a Ribbon guarded by a Xande's Clone. Given how easy real Xande was, I thought it would be simple. This turned out to be true. We gave this first Ribbon to Luneth, since he was still wearing a hat from quite early in the game and Arc was already benefitting from his Angel Robe.

The first Dark World boss we encountered was Echinda. We approached the fight similarly to how we've done most lately; apply protect status to the team starting with the mages, cast Haste on Refia and then Ingus, and then kick its butt. One thing I know about the last several bosses in this game is that they use an awful lot of death-based abilities and other save-or-suck moves, but this one didn't get too bad. Refia and Ingus both did 9999 damage at different points in the fight. We took some serious damage from a Quake spell, but otherwise it was fine.

I am surprised by how often we get full heals in this game. When you get a full heal after every boss, it really means you can let loose in nearly every fight.

On the way to our second Dark World boss, we fought another Xande's Clone for another Ribbon. This one at least put up a bit of a fight by taking out Refia with a single, powerful spell.
"Oh, I hope it's not a giant floating eyeball. That would wreck my day. I don't like giant floating eyeballs. Oh, god dammit!"
Ahriman was up next. As with Echidna, my biggest concern was immediate death... but it didn't start the fight with any of that nonsense. Refia was petrified by its attack in turn 3 and again after I got her buffs back up. She was also killed, though it was by concentrated damage rather than death effects or anything like that.


The petrification made me extra excited to earn a third Ribbon - this one for Refia - on the way to the next boss.
The next boss was the underwhelmingly-named Two Headed Dragon. Refia dealt a cool 9999 at the first action of the fight and I kind of knew this would be a pretty quick and safe one.



Almost finally, we battled Cerberus. It's another one of the relatively rare enemies that can act three times per round. It happened to use this to drop Luneth pretty early on. We got him back up though, and the rest of the fight was fine.





Now we were ready to confront the Cloud of Darkness for real! In the scripted battle, physical attacks did 0 to the right tentacle; I didn't think that was going to carry over to the real one. The lightning attack did over 2000 damage to Refia still. I gave some serious consideration to what spellcasting items I could use since this is the final battle.

Later on in the same fight, for some reason, the lightning attack only did ~700 damage to Refia with seemingly no relevant defensive buff. I wasn't sure what was going on with damage formulas, but now I realize (I think!) that there's two different-but-similar lightning attacks.


The team managed to stay up for a good long time, maintaining buffs. About 5 minutes into the battle, things got worse, with Ingus being killed and Refia being in critical status. We were kind of juggling who was standing while we endured the assault, and I tried quite hard to persevere... but it wasn't in the cards this day.

I am sure this was at least partly strategic. I left the tentacles alive, including with buffs, and that may have been a serious error.

With this defeat, and this game's lack of save points, it set me back about two hours. It's kind of like this gameplay session never even happened. It was quite demoralizing. Not that I would ever give up so close to the end of course! But I had to be done for the day.

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Final Fantasy III Classic Jobs Part XII

After a really bad run at the end of the game in the previous session, we tried again in this session on October 27, 2017. Once again, we had some technical difficulties and there was a short, mostly freeze-framed video before the main event. The only point of interest you'll be able to spot there is that I finally updated the sidebar to reflect how the party's performance seems to have changed over time:

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This video with the bulk of the gameplay picks up after a few minor random encounters near the bottom of the Syrcus Tower. This whole session is more-or-less a repeat of the previous one, except more successful, so forgive any lack of detail about the enemies and whatnot.

I was able to reach the big mirror with the wyrms' curse by about the 10-minute mark, so that's nice. My second attempt at the battle with Xande went about as well as the first - after all, this time I was armed with information! By that I mean I knew certain things, such as the fact that Xande uses some physical attacks. There were actually some minor issues that I didn't have the information about, such as Xande using Haste on himself (that was new) and that his Thundaga spell would do 2200+ damage to Ingus. Ingus getting creamed on the same turn that I was trying to cast Haste on him was a bit of a sad moment.

We still won, of course, but Xande was at least annoying. I used two Phoenix Downs.
I remarked that a lot of earlier bosses, like Leviathan, weren't really that easy. I attributed this partly to the time I spent boosting my job levels and getting the special job weapons from the Legendary Smith.

Then it was on to the World of Darkness. Like last time, as we approached each of the four major bosses, we grabbed a Ribbon from a treasure chest and battled a Xande's Clone. The first Dark World boss we encountered this time was Ahriman. It was a pretty tame fight; Ingus was able to deal 9999 damage per turn even without Haste, but he did end up petrified for a while. On the turns where Ahriman used Curaja - which was rather ineffective - we were healthy enough that Arc even cast Aeroga a couple of times and I was surprised that its damage was over 3000. Anyway, we won.


The second Dark World boss we fought was Echidna, who I was calling "Upside-Down Death Lady". We ended up in a scenario where very early in the fight, a Tornado spell affected both Refia and Ingus at the same time, and then we got Quake'd on the next turn.
 
I actually ended up doing a Phoenix Down + Elixir combo to try and get those party members back up, which was interrupted by a Quake spell and thus pretty worthless. I was rather certain that we were going to be starting over yet again, but with a bit of persistence and a few squandered rare consumables we were able to get the fight back on track. It helped that the next Tornado spell missed everyone entirely.


With my lack of success in the prior session and these fights turning out a little worse in general than last time, I was seriously considering a bit of levelling up to make things easier. I wasn't sure whether I was able to exit this dungeon entirely - I didn't think so, but wasn't sure - but I was going to leave entirely to save. But the entire Dark World portion of the game is beyond this game's point of no return, so we were sort of locked in. I decided I would fight more of the random battles here at least, so the team might gain a couple of last minute levels.

Next up was Cerberus. Nothing too noteworthy here. We won!


Each boss you defeat here provides a full heal, so I took just a couple of intentional extra random battles before facing the final Dark World crystal guardian boss. I figured I could grind some battles and benefit a tiny bit more from the full heal. Luneth was pretty close to a level up right now anyway. It's not like it was going to make a big difference, but I may as well squeeze a bit more out while it's easy.

The final Dark World crystal boss was Two-Headed Dragon. It was also pretty straightforward. We won.



Overall, my general position wasn't any different going into the final boss battle. The biggest difference maker in play, if any, is that a friend in Twitch chat had told me that one tentacle was weak to magic and the other was weak to physicals. I was ready to play up this strategy, but I was also openly expressing my nervousness. Refia was still taking huge damage from the lightning attacks. I was really happy just to get one of the two tentacles down!

At that point, the magic-weak tentacle used Haste on itself. I decided to prioritze taking out the other tentacle with even Ingus throwing out spellcasting items. Using a White Musk was particularly effective.

That very turn, the second tentacle was defeated. Now I decided to mock the Cloud of Darkness. "You are just a green lady... with a heart tattoo! You look less threatening than Zoe Saldaña."

With some of the pressure off, I started applying my buffs. I wanted everyone to be under Protect and I wanted Refia affected by Haste. A few spellcasting items helps us speed that process up, too. On many turns, Cloud of Darkness just used two mid-powered physical attacks, and it finally felt like I was in control. When Particle Beam came out, that was still pretty strong.

We took another Particle Beam right afterward, but we had a pattern going. About a turn later, Luneth ended the battle by throwing out a very potent Chocobo's Wrath item.
 

I don't think it was ever in question whether someone could win at this game with a strict party of knight, thief, white mage, black mage, but now I've done it anyway. It was also my first time completing this game end-to-end. There were parts of the game whether I really felt I wasn't enjoying it at all, and losing in the final dungeon sucks, but the general power curve at endgame has a sort of satisfying payoff. I would say I generally enjoyed this game more and more as I progressed through it.

I know this version of the game had some balance changes to make more of the jobs more endgame viable... so I am not ruling out playing this game again, perhaps on the NES version, or since it's 2023 right now perhaps the Pixel Remaster. I bet that would be a fairly different experience. And, yes, I do mean using some slightly bizarre set of job restrictions like this.

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The next "Classic Jobs" run in the Final Fantasy series: Final Fantasy IV
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy VI