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Final Fantasy Monster Party Part IV
Dec. 24th, 2025 03:37 pmAfter not playing since November 29th, I finally came back to my Final Fantasy Monster Party playthrough on December 23rd. I happened to be joined by kids.
While I had saved outside of the Temple of Fiends and even attempted it once, I really thought I'd benefit from finding a FIGHTER to join me.
FIGHTERs (or Dark Fighters in modern releases) are potentially really useful in that they've got abundant healing spells, but very rare outside of the last area itself. I figured the game's final area would take me a whole lot of tries and I thought it would be worth my time to recruit FIGHTER before heading in.
There was talk on the GameFAQs Final Fantasy board at some point before September 2018 about what monsters could defeat CHAOS, which gameenjoyer credited to robertebalmer, theorizing that PHANTOM, FIGHTER, EVILMAN and MudGOL could beat CHAOS by having MudGOL use FAST on PHANTOM and itself. While I wasn't sure how deep the analysis had gone, this gave some credit to the idea that a FIGHTER might be borderline necessary for the end of the game.
A problem here is that while FIGHTER is a fairly common enemy early in the game's final area, the only other place a FIGHTER can appear is in the Sky Castle as a very, very rare encounter. While I can meet them in the game's final area, I have no means to leave - so in terms of using enemies I've actually survived, it felt like I'd really benefit from finding them in the Sky Castle. While I understand the mechanics of this game's encounter tables, I couldn't find an easy-to-digest list of encounters by area... but I know that the rarest encounters tended to be relatively late in encounter table cycles. So my son and I fought IMPs for a bit!
My son had picked SPHINX to join the team. SPHINX is a... pretty average mid-tier monster with no standout abilities. We replaced SPHINX pretty quickly when we actually went to the Mirage Tower, settling on CHIMERA after a while.
I took a picture of what the computer terminals say in this version of the game because of a recent riddle thread, which can be contrasted with my screenshot from the Side Quest Challenge:
It took quite a while but 1 hour and 23 minutes in, after like 5 full party deaths of encounter cycles, we met some FIGHTERS.
Like MAGE and ASTOS, FIGHTERs are fairly good stat-wise and they have nice spells, but relatively low HP totals.
Naturally, this happened while I was leaving:
I actually predicted this might happen as a known quirk of the encounter tables. This time I ran away for a change - though I might've attempted it if a SORCERER was with me! We escaped successfully.
Then I healed up, purchased more items, and did attempts at the Temple of Fiends Revisited. This was attempt 2 overall: The first team I used on this day was SENTRY, FIGHTER, Blue D and CHIMERA, although we beat PHANTOM and I decided to replace SENTRY with PHANTOM. PHANTOM also managed to land a ZAP! on CHIMERA, so we were pretty quickly down to three monsters on this attempt.
As had been discussed on the NES FF1 board, PHANTOM is an offensive and defensive beast.
FIGHTER died to some Frost Ds shortly after, so I was left with PHANTOM and Blue D. They defeated LICH and KARY without much issue. A battle with six WATERs right before KRAKEN was pretty hard on them. For KRAKEN, I swapped Blue D to MudGOL so that he could use FAST on PHANTOM for massive physical damage. Under these conditions, they took out KRAKEN in three turns! Unfortunately, softened up by some WzVAMPs and with no heal potions left, PHANTOM was killed by TIAMAT on turn 1 and we lost.
For the next couple of attempts, I left PHANTOM active and had a few little team composition changes. For the first few floors, encountering Frost Ds is common enough that I didn't want to bring Gas Ds even though I appreciate their ability to clear randoms... so after a while, I was using PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and JIMERA.
When things went wrong in the early going, I just let the team lose. I figured if I got four monsters to LICH, it was a live run. I reasoned that with the elemental floors it was easier to gear up my team for specific types of encounters.
Attempt 3 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by Frost Ds a few floors in, so I let the team lose in the battle after that.
Attempt 4 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by an 8 BADMAN sneak attack very early on. I let them clobber the rest of the team, too.
Attempt 5 was the first one where I started with PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and Red D, dropping JIMERA. FIGHTER died on the first floor so I just let the team die there.
Attempt 6 also had a nasty 9 BADMAN sneak attack almost right away, but I let it ride. After that and 2 Gas Ds, I was down to 75 potions before PHANTOM. I had only used a few more by the earth floor, and the easier battles here allowed a bit of opportunity for FIGHTER to use HEL3.
For LICH, I replaced FIGHTER with Gas D specifically so he could endure a NUKE. This ended up being an excellent call since Gas D (in the second character slot where FIGHTER was) took 390 damage from LICH's turn 1 NUKE! This has us down to 35 heal potions, and we put FIGHTER back in.
We were in fine condition for KARY and won that handily.
At some point, PHANTOM's paralyzing attack worked on KARY, which made things a little bit safer.
On the water floor, it made sense to switch Red D to something else. I chose SENTRY, intending to use MudGOL but only right when I got to KRAKEN. Thus, for a very short time the team was PHANTOM, SENTRY, Blue D and FIGHTER, in that order, and then we swapped to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and MudGOL.
KRAKEN said "no" on turn 1.
We had such good plans! Oh well. The rest of the plan went well and we won handily, especially with PHANTOM stunning KRAKEN at the end.
I swapped the party around after the battle to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, and MudGOL and brought these three to TIAMAT.
Again, PHANTOM's stuntouch came in clutch and we delivered a decisive victory against TIAMAT!
After the battle, my son said, "This is our first time getting to CHAOS!" and I said, "Well, don't speak too soon."
Then we encountered four WORMs in that tiny area between TIAMAT and CHAOS' floor.
While we managed this fairly tough fight and FIGHTER's healing abilities contributed, they did kill MudGOL.
Well, we got two monsters to CHAOS. My son and I debated keeping a savestate in case we wanted to easily try again or not, and with hesitation I decided to do one.
So, this CHAOS fight! We went in with PHANTOM and FIGHTER. This meant we did not have MudGOL's FAST... but we did have FIGHTER's WALL spell, which is pretty great. Even better, PHANTOM stunned CHAOS on turn 1.
CHAOS would eventually recover from stun, but PHANTOM re-inflicted it... more than once. This allowed FIGHTER time for bits of extra healing, plus buffs like INV2 and FOG2.
With this, on our first try and with just two monsters, we defeated CHAOS with a party of monsters!
Victory!
Now for some screwing around.
Chat had actually been fairly active this day, especially with bits of participation from RetroHomebrew. My son was enjoying the engagement and wasn't feeling done yet, so we did a bit of bonus activity. There was a bit of dabbling with a party of 4 IMPs... then we took the 4 ToFR versions of the fiends through ToFR to beat CHAOS.
This... wasn't very fair at all.
Next, RetroHomebrew happened to put into the chat, "
", followed by "🤖" when my son suggested they might be a bot. So my son decided it would be nice to pick this team! The second monster was WarMECH, the third was WIZARD, and the robot emoji at the end clearly represented SENTRY. We had trouble figuring out which monster was most like Bomberman and decided on a FIRE elemental. We took this RetroHomebrew squad to the desert to try to fight a T REX.
Surprisingly, it didn't actually take very long!
Even more surprisingly, my son mis-clicked and ran away from T REX instead of defeating it. But, thanks to that encounter table quirk I discussed earlier when WarMECH appeared, it only took a few more battles to encounter a second T REX.
We won and added T REX to the list! RetroHomebrew stated they were honoured by this.
The list of defeated/available monsters was getting pretty close to done now, actually, so my son wanted to do the "catch 'em all" goal. We hunted down a GrPEDE, a BigEYE, and a FrGATOR. While doing this, we tried out the four SORCERER party that FatRatKnight had requested.
In the course of this I explained to my son that Mindflayers instant kill by removing an opponent's brain, and thus it made sense that they couldn't instantly kill a HYDRA. While this isn't mechanically a factor in Final Fantasy, somehow it felt like the SORCERER deathtouch was not particularly effective against HYDRAs.
In the end, we have encountered and defeated at least one of every monster other than OOZE (Earth Cave) and IronGOL. Maybe we will still want to do that; I don't know.
To wrap up, my son took one other unusual team on a quick jaunt through the ToFR.
Amusingly, though my son who joined me for most of this session has played Final Fantasy (mostly Dawn of Souls) and gotten all the way to CHAOS, he lost to CHAOS and hadn't saved in ages (because he was playing on an emulation handheld), so this was his first time beating the game! Super legitimate.
While we are done the playthrough the way it was spec'd out and intended, there may be more play and experimentation to do related to this so it's possible there will be a further update. My son started discussing a Nuzlocke playthrough using this Monster Party script and, honestly, that sounds like it could be a great fit. We'll see if anything else comes from the community related to this!
If this is where the playthrough ends - which would be logical, since the original goal is complete - then I'll say the script is still a bit of a mess but this is certainly one of the more interesting playthroughs I've done, and the actual coding and setup required is probably the most intricate I've done; the only thing that could come close in complexity is the script that forces job stats in Final Fantasy II.
There was a bit of break in the timing but life got really complicated for me in November, thus the partial shift to the Trials of Mana event. Playing FF1 with a party of monsters had problems but it was super fun and very novel, which I like. I am extremely grateful to FatRatKnight for their contributions in terms of coding, ideation and general enthusiasm.
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While I had saved outside of the Temple of Fiends and even attempted it once, I really thought I'd benefit from finding a FIGHTER to join me.
FIGHTERs (or Dark Fighters in modern releases) are potentially really useful in that they've got abundant healing spells, but very rare outside of the last area itself. I figured the game's final area would take me a whole lot of tries and I thought it would be worth my time to recruit FIGHTER before heading in.
There was talk on the GameFAQs Final Fantasy board at some point before September 2018 about what monsters could defeat CHAOS, which gameenjoyer credited to robertebalmer, theorizing that PHANTOM, FIGHTER, EVILMAN and MudGOL could beat CHAOS by having MudGOL use FAST on PHANTOM and itself. While I wasn't sure how deep the analysis had gone, this gave some credit to the idea that a FIGHTER might be borderline necessary for the end of the game.
A problem here is that while FIGHTER is a fairly common enemy early in the game's final area, the only other place a FIGHTER can appear is in the Sky Castle as a very, very rare encounter. While I can meet them in the game's final area, I have no means to leave - so in terms of using enemies I've actually survived, it felt like I'd really benefit from finding them in the Sky Castle. While I understand the mechanics of this game's encounter tables, I couldn't find an easy-to-digest list of encounters by area... but I know that the rarest encounters tended to be relatively late in encounter table cycles. So my son and I fought IMPs for a bit!
My son had picked SPHINX to join the team. SPHINX is a... pretty average mid-tier monster with no standout abilities. We replaced SPHINX pretty quickly when we actually went to the Mirage Tower, settling on CHIMERA after a while.
I took a picture of what the computer terminals say in this version of the game because of a recent riddle thread, which can be contrasted with my screenshot from the Side Quest Challenge:
It took quite a while but 1 hour and 23 minutes in, after like 5 full party deaths of encounter cycles, we met some FIGHTERS.
Like MAGE and ASTOS, FIGHTERs are fairly good stat-wise and they have nice spells, but relatively low HP totals.
Naturally, this happened while I was leaving:
I actually predicted this might happen as a known quirk of the encounter tables. This time I ran away for a change - though I might've attempted it if a SORCERER was with me! We escaped successfully.
Then I healed up, purchased more items, and did attempts at the Temple of Fiends Revisited. This was attempt 2 overall: The first team I used on this day was SENTRY, FIGHTER, Blue D and CHIMERA, although we beat PHANTOM and I decided to replace SENTRY with PHANTOM. PHANTOM also managed to land a ZAP! on CHIMERA, so we were pretty quickly down to three monsters on this attempt.
As had been discussed on the NES FF1 board, PHANTOM is an offensive and defensive beast.
FIGHTER died to some Frost Ds shortly after, so I was left with PHANTOM and Blue D. They defeated LICH and KARY without much issue. A battle with six WATERs right before KRAKEN was pretty hard on them. For KRAKEN, I swapped Blue D to MudGOL so that he could use FAST on PHANTOM for massive physical damage. Under these conditions, they took out KRAKEN in three turns! Unfortunately, softened up by some WzVAMPs and with no heal potions left, PHANTOM was killed by TIAMAT on turn 1 and we lost.
For the next couple of attempts, I left PHANTOM active and had a few little team composition changes. For the first few floors, encountering Frost Ds is common enough that I didn't want to bring Gas Ds even though I appreciate their ability to clear randoms... so after a while, I was using PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and JIMERA.
When things went wrong in the early going, I just let the team lose. I figured if I got four monsters to LICH, it was a live run. I reasoned that with the elemental floors it was easier to gear up my team for specific types of encounters.
Attempt 3 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by Frost Ds a few floors in, so I let the team lose in the battle after that.
Attempt 4 was doomed when JIMERA and FIGHTER were both killed by an 8 BADMAN sneak attack very early on. I let them clobber the rest of the team, too.
Attempt 5 was the first one where I started with PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and Red D, dropping JIMERA. FIGHTER died on the first floor so I just let the team die there.
Attempt 6 also had a nasty 9 BADMAN sneak attack almost right away, but I let it ride. After that and 2 Gas Ds, I was down to 75 potions before PHANTOM. I had only used a few more by the earth floor, and the easier battles here allowed a bit of opportunity for FIGHTER to use HEL3.
For LICH, I replaced FIGHTER with Gas D specifically so he could endure a NUKE. This ended up being an excellent call since Gas D (in the second character slot where FIGHTER was) took 390 damage from LICH's turn 1 NUKE! This has us down to 35 heal potions, and we put FIGHTER back in.
We were in fine condition for KARY and won that handily.
At some point, PHANTOM's paralyzing attack worked on KARY, which made things a little bit safer.
On the water floor, it made sense to switch Red D to something else. I chose SENTRY, intending to use MudGOL but only right when I got to KRAKEN. Thus, for a very short time the team was PHANTOM, SENTRY, Blue D and FIGHTER, in that order, and then we swapped to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, Blue D and MudGOL.
KRAKEN said "no" on turn 1.
We had such good plans! Oh well. The rest of the plan went well and we won handily, especially with PHANTOM stunning KRAKEN at the end.
I swapped the party around after the battle to PHANTOM, FIGHTER, and MudGOL and brought these three to TIAMAT.
Again, PHANTOM's stuntouch came in clutch and we delivered a decisive victory against TIAMAT!
After the battle, my son said, "This is our first time getting to CHAOS!" and I said, "Well, don't speak too soon."
Then we encountered four WORMs in that tiny area between TIAMAT and CHAOS' floor.
While we managed this fairly tough fight and FIGHTER's healing abilities contributed, they did kill MudGOL.
Well, we got two monsters to CHAOS. My son and I debated keeping a savestate in case we wanted to easily try again or not, and with hesitation I decided to do one.
So, this CHAOS fight! We went in with PHANTOM and FIGHTER. This meant we did not have MudGOL's FAST... but we did have FIGHTER's WALL spell, which is pretty great. Even better, PHANTOM stunned CHAOS on turn 1.
CHAOS would eventually recover from stun, but PHANTOM re-inflicted it... more than once. This allowed FIGHTER time for bits of extra healing, plus buffs like INV2 and FOG2.
With this, on our first try and with just two monsters, we defeated CHAOS with a party of monsters!
Victory!
Now for some screwing around.
Chat had actually been fairly active this day, especially with bits of participation from RetroHomebrew. My son was enjoying the engagement and wasn't feeling done yet, so we did a bit of bonus activity. There was a bit of dabbling with a party of 4 IMPs... then we took the 4 ToFR versions of the fiends through ToFR to beat CHAOS.
This... wasn't very fair at all.
Next, RetroHomebrew happened to put into the chat, "
", followed by "🤖" when my son suggested they might be a bot. So my son decided it would be nice to pick this team! The second monster was WarMECH, the third was WIZARD, and the robot emoji at the end clearly represented SENTRY. We had trouble figuring out which monster was most like Bomberman and decided on a FIRE elemental. We took this RetroHomebrew squad to the desert to try to fight a T REX.Surprisingly, it didn't actually take very long!
Even more surprisingly, my son mis-clicked and ran away from T REX instead of defeating it. But, thanks to that encounter table quirk I discussed earlier when WarMECH appeared, it only took a few more battles to encounter a second T REX.
We won and added T REX to the list! RetroHomebrew stated they were honoured by this.
The list of defeated/available monsters was getting pretty close to done now, actually, so my son wanted to do the "catch 'em all" goal. We hunted down a GrPEDE, a BigEYE, and a FrGATOR. While doing this, we tried out the four SORCERER party that FatRatKnight had requested.
In the course of this I explained to my son that Mindflayers instant kill by removing an opponent's brain, and thus it made sense that they couldn't instantly kill a HYDRA. While this isn't mechanically a factor in Final Fantasy, somehow it felt like the SORCERER deathtouch was not particularly effective against HYDRAs.
In the end, we have encountered and defeated at least one of every monster other than OOZE (Earth Cave) and IronGOL. Maybe we will still want to do that; I don't know.
To wrap up, my son took one other unusual team on a quick jaunt through the ToFR.
Amusingly, though my son who joined me for most of this session has played Final Fantasy (mostly Dawn of Souls) and gotten all the way to CHAOS, he lost to CHAOS and hadn't saved in ages (because he was playing on an emulation handheld), so this was his first time beating the game! Super legitimate.
While we are done the playthrough the way it was spec'd out and intended, there may be more play and experimentation to do related to this so it's possible there will be a further update. My son started discussing a Nuzlocke playthrough using this Monster Party script and, honestly, that sounds like it could be a great fit. We'll see if anything else comes from the community related to this!
If this is where the playthrough ends - which would be logical, since the original goal is complete - then I'll say the script is still a bit of a mess but this is certainly one of the more interesting playthroughs I've done, and the actual coding and setup required is probably the most intricate I've done; the only thing that could come close in complexity is the script that forces job stats in Final Fantasy II.
There was a bit of break in the timing but life got really complicated for me in November, thus the partial shift to the Trials of Mana event. Playing FF1 with a party of monsters had problems but it was super fun and very novel, which I like. I am extremely grateful to FatRatKnight for their contributions in terms of coding, ideation and general enthusiasm.
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