Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part III
Aug. 23rd, 2023 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingAbout a week later, we're picking up our adventures of a knight, thief, white mage, black mage party in Final Fantasy IV.
It was a weird session, with my headset breaking, using a different mic than usual, errors in the hack, and live cat drama... but we're going to focus on gameplay here, of course. We're starting from after defeating Scarmiglione but before the scene where Cecil would normally become a paladin.
Almost immediately, we ran into another error in the hack. Where last time I realized I was going to miss the Legend Sword/Mythgraven blade and made an effort to fix it before I started playing, I didn't realize I had left in a trigger that "Tellah Version 2" (who joins on the way up Ordeals) should leave the party and "Tellah Version 3" (who knows all his spells) should join. Consequently, since Tellah was never initialized... well, things were weird.
Another hotfix was needed. It was quick. It's funny because this whole crucial scene doesn't actually do very much for us besides grant the Legend Sword, at least when it's working as intended. With that we went back to Mysidia (appreciating the new sword in a few battles along the way!) and took Serpent Road back to Baron.
We met Yang. In the battle with two Guards before you meet Yang, I happened to remember that they counter things with status spells and are generally annoying, and wanting to do something useful with Porom's turn I tried using Silence. I had never done this before, but it turned out to be an excellent, resource-efficient strategy against these annoying enemies. With a couple of Boasts and a few swings of the Legend Sword, Yang wasn't hard to beat either.
I thought the Waterway under Baron would be tough, given that you normally have two fairly good offensive mages and Yang with strong, elementally-empowered claw attacks... but it really wasn't that bad. Palom's Blizzara and Thundara spells were frequently useful but Cecil's damage was far better and more consistent since getting the Legend Sword. We did Flee from a few of the more annoying formations, like the ones with ElecFish. We got the Ancient Sword but I reasoned it was a downgrade for Cecil.
I particularly enjoyed the retranslation of this line, which I didn't understand in the original version:
And thus we fought Baigan! I was a bit worried about these boss fights, particularly because they are more-or-less consecutive, but also because this part is based around the 5-person party with two strong attackers (one of whom has elemental attacks) and two offensive mages. Given this worry, I decided to be strategic, using Hermes items on Cecil to get his strong attacks out more often and using Boast with Palom waiting for single, strong offensive spells while we waited for his Reflect spell to expire. It worked out great here.
This left the RightArm! I was worried about it exploding at the end of the fight, and it did, but it wasn't so damaging that there was an issue.
There's no exit and no convenient save point so I risked heading to the throne room, though I did go back up the west tower of the castle to rest first and raided a bit of Baron Castle's treasure. Then we went for Cagnazzo.
This fight had me worried, especially as I didn't get my Thunder spells out fast enough to neutralize his first two waves! I was prioritizing Palom's Boasting in order to make his spells more effective. Partway through, I had to change the strategy such that whomever's turn it was (especially a support character like Porom or Thief) would just throw out a ZeusRage item to get rid of the water. Cecil was fighting with help from a Hermes boost and, later, a Berserk spell from Porom, which gave him frequent, strong attacks. Thief had to use a few Hi-Potions to keep people on their feet and there were close calls, but with our careful preparation our victory was pretty decisive.
Now it's airship time! This is probably my favourite part of the entire game, flying around getting goodies from Agart (Boomrang), Mist (Dancing Dagger), Silvera/Mythril (a bunch of mythril equipment for Cecil), and Troia (um, nothing?). I was considering doing Eblan Castle, too, which has lots of goodies but some fairly hard fights to earn the best treasures but I decided to leave that for after Cave Magnes.
Thus... it was time to hoard non-metallic goods. This was a non-issue for the mages but it took some effort to outfit Thief and Cecil.
Thief had three upgrades at this point: Mythril Dagger, Boomrang, and Dancing Dagger. All of them appear in vanilla, and all of them have narrow use cases in vanilla. But for our normally non-existent thief, this was very exciting. Mythril Dagger and Boomrang are big upgrades, they are the same strength, and both have the ability to hit a weakness... but the Boomrang's effectiveness against flying enemies is much more common and it's non-metallic, plus it can be used from the back row! It was generally great to have a Boomrang... which I've never said in vanilla Final Fantasy IV.
The Dancing Dagger is a bit stronger and has its itemcast as an option, too. If we don't mind moving thief to the front row, it's better than the Boomrang when magnetism isn't in play. Thief is also able to use a Mythril Shield in less-magnetic areas, which is exciting. I guess the idea is that a thief can use a very light shield.
I couldn't find much in the way of passable equipment for Cecil for Cave Magnes. At first, I walked in with him fighting barehanded but I quickly found that barehanded characters that aren't Yang in this game are awful. I don't know why I was surprised. So I went to Mysidia to get him something. Really, it isn't a whole lot better than nothing. I figured I would mostly run from battles until we had dealt with the magnetic field.
For the few battles we did fight here, it was new and different that Thief was so much better than Cecil. Especially against Cave Magnes' many bats, Thief's Boomrang attacks made Cecil look like a useless bystander.
Next up would normally be the Tower of Zot, but I decided I wanted to do Eblan Castle now anyway, even though the only really notable treasure there was the Slumber Sword (which itself would be mostly obsolete pretty quickly). It actually went strangely well considering our constraints!
I got a Whisker in a chest right before the monster-in-a-box for the Blood Spear, and I used it to insta-kill the Lamia. Then remembering that I had been able to use the Change Rod to turn the kittycats in Cave Magnes into pigs, I tried the same on the Coeurls and found it worked! Well that was oddly trivial.
On the other fight, I used a Bronze Hourglass. I can't believe how well that worked. The fight for the Slumber Sword against a SteelGolem (who is not stale) and his skeleton buddies wasn't bad at all.
We used an hourglass to beat the MadOgres, too. I usually find this part tough in vanilla, even when Yang is using Charm Claw/Fairy Claw!
Next we'll do the Tower of Zot! The game felt a lot easier this session in general, which I would attribute to having the game more closely balanced around the types of characters we happen to have. This feeling might change after the Tower of Zot, where in vanilla you would have a party of five non-thieves mostly consistently through endgame.
Here's how the team's stats happen to look now:
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It was a weird session, with my headset breaking, using a different mic than usual, errors in the hack, and live cat drama... but we're going to focus on gameplay here, of course. We're starting from after defeating Scarmiglione but before the scene where Cecil would normally become a paladin.
Almost immediately, we ran into another error in the hack. Where last time I realized I was going to miss the Legend Sword/Mythgraven blade and made an effort to fix it before I started playing, I didn't realize I had left in a trigger that "Tellah Version 2" (who joins on the way up Ordeals) should leave the party and "Tellah Version 3" (who knows all his spells) should join. Consequently, since Tellah was never initialized... well, things were weird.
Another hotfix was needed. It was quick. It's funny because this whole crucial scene doesn't actually do very much for us besides grant the Legend Sword, at least when it's working as intended. With that we went back to Mysidia (appreciating the new sword in a few battles along the way!) and took Serpent Road back to Baron.
We met Yang. In the battle with two Guards before you meet Yang, I happened to remember that they counter things with status spells and are generally annoying, and wanting to do something useful with Porom's turn I tried using Silence. I had never done this before, but it turned out to be an excellent, resource-efficient strategy against these annoying enemies. With a couple of Boasts and a few swings of the Legend Sword, Yang wasn't hard to beat either.
I thought the Waterway under Baron would be tough, given that you normally have two fairly good offensive mages and Yang with strong, elementally-empowered claw attacks... but it really wasn't that bad. Palom's Blizzara and Thundara spells were frequently useful but Cecil's damage was far better and more consistent since getting the Legend Sword. We did Flee from a few of the more annoying formations, like the ones with ElecFish. We got the Ancient Sword but I reasoned it was a downgrade for Cecil.
I particularly enjoyed the retranslation of this line, which I didn't understand in the original version:
And thus we fought Baigan! I was a bit worried about these boss fights, particularly because they are more-or-less consecutive, but also because this part is based around the 5-person party with two strong attackers (one of whom has elemental attacks) and two offensive mages. Given this worry, I decided to be strategic, using Hermes items on Cecil to get his strong attacks out more often and using Boast with Palom waiting for single, strong offensive spells while we waited for his Reflect spell to expire. It worked out great here.
This left the RightArm! I was worried about it exploding at the end of the fight, and it did, but it wasn't so damaging that there was an issue.
There's no exit and no convenient save point so I risked heading to the throne room, though I did go back up the west tower of the castle to rest first and raided a bit of Baron Castle's treasure. Then we went for Cagnazzo.
This fight had me worried, especially as I didn't get my Thunder spells out fast enough to neutralize his first two waves! I was prioritizing Palom's Boasting in order to make his spells more effective. Partway through, I had to change the strategy such that whomever's turn it was (especially a support character like Porom or Thief) would just throw out a ZeusRage item to get rid of the water. Cecil was fighting with help from a Hermes boost and, later, a Berserk spell from Porom, which gave him frequent, strong attacks. Thief had to use a few Hi-Potions to keep people on their feet and there were close calls, but with our careful preparation our victory was pretty decisive.
Now it's airship time! This is probably my favourite part of the entire game, flying around getting goodies from Agart (Boomrang), Mist (Dancing Dagger), Silvera/Mythril (a bunch of mythril equipment for Cecil), and Troia (um, nothing?). I was considering doing Eblan Castle, too, which has lots of goodies but some fairly hard fights to earn the best treasures but I decided to leave that for after Cave Magnes.
Thus... it was time to hoard non-metallic goods. This was a non-issue for the mages but it took some effort to outfit Thief and Cecil.
Thief had three upgrades at this point: Mythril Dagger, Boomrang, and Dancing Dagger. All of them appear in vanilla, and all of them have narrow use cases in vanilla. But for our normally non-existent thief, this was very exciting. Mythril Dagger and Boomrang are big upgrades, they are the same strength, and both have the ability to hit a weakness... but the Boomrang's effectiveness against flying enemies is much more common and it's non-metallic, plus it can be used from the back row! It was generally great to have a Boomrang... which I've never said in vanilla Final Fantasy IV.The Dancing Dagger is a bit stronger and has its itemcast as an option, too. If we don't mind moving thief to the front row, it's better than the Boomrang when magnetism isn't in play. Thief is also able to use a Mythril Shield in less-magnetic areas, which is exciting. I guess the idea is that a thief can use a very light shield.
I couldn't find much in the way of passable equipment for Cecil for Cave Magnes. At first, I walked in with him fighting barehanded but I quickly found that barehanded characters that aren't Yang in this game are awful. I don't know why I was surprised. So I went to Mysidia to get him something. Really, it isn't a whole lot better than nothing. I figured I would mostly run from battles until we had dealt with the magnetic field.For the few battles we did fight here, it was new and different that Thief was so much better than Cecil. Especially against Cave Magnes' many bats, Thief's Boomrang attacks made Cecil look like a useless bystander.
I had also gotten Palom the Change Rod hidden in Mist (along with a GoldPin that Porom was using). I had never really experimented with the Change Rod at this point in the vanilla game, but it was pretty fun. Pigs everywhere!
As usual, the first battle with the Dark Elf doesn't go well. The ME ATTACK YOU attack went about the same as usual.
Edward sang his fae-repelling song to weaken the Dark Elf and things got better, as usual.
I tried to get buffed in this first phase to make the Dark Dragon part easier but didn't get as far along as I'd like. Once again, I had Cecil Berserked and attacking with his powerful Legend Sword, and Palom Boasted to cast powerful spells. However, the pendulum hath swung, and now it seemed like Cecil has been dealing the lion's share of damage on these last few bosses.
Dark Dragon was still dangerous - as you may be able to tell by our HP values - particularly since it casts Weak followed by other spells, but we won.
As usual, the first battle with the Dark Elf doesn't go well. The ME ATTACK YOU attack went about the same as usual.
Edward sang his fae-repelling song to weaken the Dark Elf and things got better, as usual.
I tried to get buffed in this first phase to make the Dark Dragon part easier but didn't get as far along as I'd like. Once again, I had Cecil Berserked and attacking with his powerful Legend Sword, and Palom Boasted to cast powerful spells. However, the pendulum hath swung, and now it seemed like Cecil has been dealing the lion's share of damage on these last few bosses.
Dark Dragon was still dangerous - as you may be able to tell by our HP values - particularly since it casts Weak followed by other spells, but we won.
Next up would normally be the Tower of Zot, but I decided I wanted to do Eblan Castle now anyway, even though the only really notable treasure there was the Slumber Sword (which itself would be mostly obsolete pretty quickly). It actually went strangely well considering our constraints!
I got a Whisker in a chest right before the monster-in-a-box for the Blood Spear, and I used it to insta-kill the Lamia. Then remembering that I had been able to use the Change Rod to turn the kittycats in Cave Magnes into pigs, I tried the same on the Coeurls and found it worked! Well that was oddly trivial.
On the other fight, I used a Bronze Hourglass. I can't believe how well that worked. The fight for the Slumber Sword against a SteelGolem (who is not stale) and his skeleton buddies wasn't bad at all.
We used an hourglass to beat the MadOgres, too. I usually find this part tough in vanilla, even when Yang is using Charm Claw/Fairy Claw!
Next we'll do the Tower of Zot! The game felt a lot easier this session in general, which I would attribute to having the game more closely balanced around the types of characters we happen to have. This feeling might change after the Tower of Zot, where in vanilla you would have a party of five non-thieves mostly consistently through endgame.
Here's how the team's stats happen to look now:
<< Start | < Previous | Index | Next >
