Final Fantasy IV Classic Jobs Part VII
Oct. 1st, 2023 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingWe finished with these last two sessions on September 30th. I guess since it was two sessions I'll break up the description here, too.
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.
<< Start | < Previous | Index | Next >
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.
<< Start | < Previous | Index | Next >
