Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge 2023 Part IV

[freshfeeling]

This was played on December 8th. I started by saying, "We're going to be getting into the tricky part of the run."
I was right.

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When I suggested this part would be tricky, I realized there was a long string of bosses - and some normal enemies - who were very dependent on Crono's lightning attacks. Robo can also use lightning, but only via his final tech, Shock.
Among these bosses is Masa & Mune, who Crono can normally cancel out of its strongest attack, Nizbel, whose defense is only lowered with lightning, Magus, who swaps elemental vulnerabilities, and Nizbel II, who is Nizbel but worse. If any part of the game was not designed for what I'm doing here, it's the next few hours.

We got to Masa & Mune. For the first fight, I happened to target whichever one is on the left, and that seemed to work out nicely. After they merged, I used an Ice Tackle, which dealt 719 damage; suddenly I found myself not that worried! He only ended up charging tornado energy once, and indeed that attack was pretty strong, but hardly the worst thing we've endured. I certainly didn't need to follow VeghEsther's advice!


I went and got the Hero Medal and the Masamune hilt from Frog's home, and then I thought I could circumvent some of the plot directives by jumping into 65M B.C. This turned out to be incorrect, so we fell of a cliff for no real reason. We went to see Melchior first and then fell of the cliff again to meet Ayla.
 

We did a prehistoric party and drank some soup, and then hunting before heading into the Forest Maze. I did two "rounds" of the Hunting Range and eventually battled a Nu, which I had wanted to do anyway. With the trade items I got, I was able to get Marle, Lucca and Robo each a new weapon and some up-to-date armor. The Ruby Vests will be useful for a while.

The Forest Maze did feel considerably slower than usual, but it wasn't especially hard or anything. I had to recall which enemies in this part of the game were more resistant to physical attacks or spells. Then we entered the Reptite Lair. I tried to wait for EvilWeevils to dig holes, but it didn't happen fast enough (and I didn't remember how this worked well enough) that I ended up skipping that part for a bit. Most enemies here are weak to spells - lightning in particular, of course! But we had little problem dealing with them, besides the rather beefy Winged Apes.

We got to the bottom with no problem, and started the Nizbel fight. I found that my attacks were usually doing roughly 10 damage. This including techs and spells of different elements. I couldn't find any reasonable means to damage him. I was either going to have to fight him like this, or grind until Robo learns Shock... and I chose to do the former. However, I figured if I was going to be hitting Nizbel with 10-damage attacks, I would benefit from all of Haste, Protect and Heal Beam so I reset the game, loaded my save, and did a short grind to gain these next techs for each character. I happened to find a great spot where four Reptites that go down to a single Laser Spin appear right next to a doorway and give 8 tech points. We needed fewer than 10 fights with them for everyone to learn their next techs.


It didn't take long, and I thought this would be the difference-maker, so we went back to Nizbel.


I have a feeling this fight is going to be one I remember as a major highlight - or lowlight, perhaps? - of this entire run. Really, there were three options:

1. Just use normal attacks constantly, monitor HP frequently to keep up with healing.
2. Apply Protect and Haste as buffs, monitor HP but less frequently since we get more actions and take less damage, also monitor TP since we're casting the buffs, and still use normal attacks.
3. Grind until Robo learns Shock.

 

I chose option 2. I am still not sure it's better than option 1, but I really didn't want to do option 3 - although there's a chance I'll have to do it anyway for Nizbel II. I didn't realize that Protect and Haste both have durations in this game, but they seem to work out to roughly 8 turns for Protect and roughly 15 turns for Haste ("turns" probably aren't the actual units used by the game). I had to keep re-casting those, and with that along with my healing I used probably roughly 10 Mid Ethers and a few other restorative items. There was nothing else interesting here.

This successful (?) fight with Nizbel took 38 minutes to beat... and that was with a fair bit of fast forwarding.
 
Could I have grinded for Shock in 38 minutes? Probably not.
Azala said, "But remember, WE Reptites will rule the world!" and I replied, "I dunno, it looks like the dinosaurs are gonna be around for a good long time at this rate!".

We went back to Melchior and got the Masamune fixed, and then we showed it to Frog. We saw some flashbacks, and we proceeded to Magus' Castle. Once again, I found myself having to get used to which enemies were more vulnerable to elemental attacks and such, which I suppose is normal.

At the junction where you need to fight Slash and Flea, I decided to go for Flea first to get rid of the bat that follows the party around. Flea uses a lot of status attacks, but they're generally not that threatening in this game. I did use a Heal to cure some confusion/chaos once, but mostly I won with a barrage of Ice Tackles. Robo got hit with MP buster but that wasn't a big deal, especially since he's in the party anyway and thus less annoying to fix out of battle.
 
Flea gives a Magic Tab as a prize. I've been giving the few Magic Tabs I found so far to Robo since he tends to have way higher multipliers on his non-physical techs, and I'd say it's been paying off.

Normally the prize from Slash - the Slasher - is a better prize, since it's a good-for-this-point weapon for Crono with a nice speed bonus. But without Crono on the team it's quite pointless. I decided to fight Slash's first, swordless battle with just normal attacks to conserve MP. That worked out fine. His damage really does shoot up once he gets a sword though, with several attacks hitting around the 100-damage mark. As well, Slash is immune to water, which means Ice Tackle isn't an option. It took more than Robo's entire MP stock worth of Robo Tackles to take him out, requiring some mid-battle ether usage.
 

We proceeded through the castle, usually avoiding battles where we could. There are a few fairly good items in chests that we could take advantage of, like the DoomFinger and some armor upgrades. I grabbed the second Mist Robe before Ozzie and then realized that against Ozzie and Magus, your defense stat really doesn't matter very much and we'd be much further ahead to prioritize elemental properties and stat boosts, so Lucca put her Taban Vest back on and Marle wore a Ruby Vest.

I thought the battle with Magus might be really tough when I used Ice Tackle and he absorbed it, but it was literally our first action and I'm not sure what state his elemental properties begin in. Then he became fire-weak and Fire Punch did about 80 damage. Next, he became lightning-weak, which is a tough spot for us. I randomly used Robo Tackle and it did terrible damage, but also prompted him to change his weakness; I don't think I knew this happened. I think anytime I've played this game from a new save normally I've carefully observed the elemental juggling intent of this fight without throwing out other arbitrary attacks, besides Frog using the Masamune.

So Magus then shuffled through shadow-weakness (which we can hit with Laser Spin and Antipode) and then, finally he was vulnerable to water. I happily announced, "Ice Tack-le!".
 
It did 668 damage. Not bad. At this point my concerns about this battle were alleviated. In fact, he was already into his second phase: charging for one turn to cast Dark Matter.

"You have no idea what it was like to fight a triceratops to get to you, sir!"

Dark Matter is pretty damaging, but even in vanilla play you'd still have to endure it at least once. It was bad but Heal Beam had us back on track. Being able to focus on offense meant we could do things like use Ice Tackle for... 922 damage!
 

Magus did not last long at this point.



We woke up in Ioka Village, we did a few more trades for some weapon upgrades, and then we saved. I'm still considering how to approach Nizbel II but in the very short term I can just consider that future Fresh's problem.

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