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freshfeelingThis lengthy, final play session of this challenge was played on January 10, 2021, just over three years after it started. There were long breaks; it does not actually take three years to play this game.
I started with a few propositions and shopping again. We got a random encounter at Fovoham Plains which was just against a bunch of squidrakens. I took a gamble on casting Bolt 4 on an arbitrary chunk of the map where I thought they would want to go, and then indeed, they walked directly into the area of effect. This battle was dumb.
Next up, we went to Igros. The battle against Dycedarg and/or his eldest brother was interesting. First of all, having a female Ramza/Faris allowed me to use Steal Heart against the many male knights in this battle. I didn't recall that Dycedarg had Stasis Sword - I thought he just had the Mighty Sword abilities. He used that to wreck my first plan with Krile.
Zalbag, as usual, was participating as a badly-equipped chemist, but he actually knew Hi-Potion which was somewhat helpful. Dycedarg used his shield to block several high-powered spells cast by Lenna, and despite all of Faris' successful flirtations it seemed luck was against us.
The second attempt at this battle was even more interesting. I thought taking more care with positioning could make a real difference. I had a lot of good plans, but few of them worked out. Dycedarg still weathered Krile's spells and blocked Lenna's spells. What he couldn't weather as well was the sword strikes of his own charmed knight.
The biggest surprise in all of this is that when Dycedarg transforms into Adramelk, his entourage of knights disappears. However, my charmed knight friend just didn't.
Leopold the knight remained in the battle. He was still charmed when the battle started, and took a good hard swing at Adramelk. His charm wore off shortly after, and I thought that since Leopold can do so much more damage than Faris it made sense to just re-charm Leopold and use him for most of the fighting.
Also somewhat notable: Lenna had reason and opportunity to use an Ether for the first time here. Bartz, Leopold and Faris all surrounded Adramelk. Bartz was able to use Speed Break, Faris kept Leopold charmed, and my mages with their restored MP pools were able to bring out the big guns. Naturally it was Leopold who dealt the killing blow.
Leopold contributed nearly 800 damage against Adramelk, and that doesn't even count his contributions against Dycedarg; he was absolutely the MVP of the battle. Incredible.
Next was Murond Holy Place. I think this might be the only required battle with geomancers in the whole game. Faris immediately charmed the one priest who stands on top of the temple and talks at the beginning. He struck one of his friends, and then to cure his charm someone use geomancy on him, inflicting slow. It was silly.
The battle was a stable one but I made a couple of mad moves consecutively, spending all of Krile's MP on two casts of Holy and then accidentally aiming Reraise on an already-dead Bartz. Despite that, we won.
Inside the Murond temple, we had to fight Vormav, Rofel and Kletian. They're quite strong but also quick to retreat if you target Vormav. Mighty Sword is as annoying as ever.
"Black Robe destroyed? Now my elemental damage is all cut. Well, let's see if I can maybe just nuke Vormav in the back and solve all our problems. Actually, that looks pretty good to me! Let's do that!"
Lenna got ready to incinerate Vormav with Flare, and then Kletian went to counter her spell, so then Bartz attacked Kletian to stop his spell, only to find that Kletian going down causes Vormav to run. It was a strange and very short battle.
The next battle is a tomb-like area under Murond where zombie Zalbag appears. I forgot to re-equip the mages after they had them smashed in the previous battle. Right away, Bartz was affected by Blood Suck (which I discussed a bit in the previous update) and then I said, "Okay, we're Holy and Flare-ing this situation.". Faris charmed an ultima demon and we trained our powerful spells on Zalbag. The demons kept each other busy, and Lenna destroyed Zalbag with Flare.
"Of all my bag-related siblings, you were my favourite."
I proceeded to the endgame at Orbonne, but ran into a random battle at Sweegy Woods. It was against two goblins, one bomb, and one skeleton. I just put the team all on auto-battle right away. It was trivially easy but made an interesting sort of point about how far we had come.
We went into the book storage (fourth floor) at Orbonne Monastery, which begins the endgame sequence of battles - sort of a point of no return. There are monks, knights, and archers. I targetted a bunch of them with an Ice 4, where knights just wandered into the blast radius, and a couple of the other enemies fell in love with Faris.
In general, my choices were good, my positioning was good, and even luck was on my side so this battle was sort of a non-event... besides Faris having her Power Sleeve broken.
Next was the battle with Loffrey/Waffle in the fifth floor underground. It features a lot of mages. Fighting mages isn't too bad; we can benefit from things like Lenna's Counter Magic. I also pointed out that charming a mage has the fun side effect of cancelling their spellcasting, which I quickly put into action with Pado the wizard.
Right after, Faris had a second Power Sleeve smashed, this time by Rofel. Lenna aimed a Flare spell at Rofel, which I knew wouldn't kill him but would likely come close. It was successful, but it was ultimately Rofel's charmed wizard buddy, Pado, who ended the fight for us.
As the room blew up around us: "Where do Pado and Cedric and them go? ... What happened to Pado? Maybe it'll be like Adramelk where he shows up in the next scene! My friend, uh, Leopold... maybe Leopold will be there! Leopold was there when we beat Adramelk. Like, I have to think he's doing okay!"
Sadly, neither Pado nor Leopold joined us in Murond Death City. Before the next battle, I changed Faris' reaction ability to Catch. Since I wanted to keep at least one Power Sleeve around, I instead outfitted Faris with a Judo Outfit. The battle with Kletian includes ninjas, samurai, and time mages. It started out well enough.
For some reason when Kletian was charging Dark Holy against one of my characters I thought the right move was using Magic Break with Bartz instead of just trying to take him out entirely. I don't think I even looked at the viability. I mean, tactically it's interesting at least. And it worked.
Kletian was brought into critical status by Lenna's weak spell and Krile's Holy anyway, and reducing a powerful caster's MA by 3 is great. He has Magic Save though, so he gained one back pretty quickly. It didn't matter; Faris stabbed him to death shortly after.
I kind of wonder what becomes of Kletian's 6 reasonably powerful, still-living henchmen.
This next fight is the rematch with Balk in Lost Sacred Precincts. Balk has chemist allies with guns across a huge battle field, and some powerful monster allies; it's not usually an easy one, in my opinion. We had terrible luck with randomized hydra attacks and magic guns and such, and I reset after a couple of turns when I was down to one unit with no reasonable path to recovery.
On attempt #2, I gave most of the team White Robes to reduce the elemental damage. That helped quite a bit, and Faris seduced a hyudra successfully a couple of times.
The hyudra single-handedly (but triple-headedly) took out the dark behemoth and helped us deal with the tiamat. A random Counter Magic proc really eased up the pressure from the enemy chemist; in general, a lot of things went our way this time. Krile dealt the final blow to Balk with Holy.
Although it's sort of a multi-part battle, this brought us to the final fight-ish. The battle with Hashmalum was easy because this team is actually quite solid when it comes to single-target damage. He dropped a Meteor on us but we got better. Lenna ended the fight with Flare.
This brings us to the real final battle in two parts. Alma joins us and I seem to have forgotten to turn her into a poorly-equipped chemist! Oh well.
I started with a few propositions and shopping again. We got a random encounter at Fovoham Plains which was just against a bunch of squidrakens. I took a gamble on casting Bolt 4 on an arbitrary chunk of the map where I thought they would want to go, and then indeed, they walked directly into the area of effect. This battle was dumb.
Next up, we went to Igros. The battle against Dycedarg and/or his eldest brother was interesting. First of all, having a female Ramza/Faris allowed me to use Steal Heart against the many male knights in this battle. I didn't recall that Dycedarg had Stasis Sword - I thought he just had the Mighty Sword abilities. He used that to wreck my first plan with Krile.
Zalbag, as usual, was participating as a badly-equipped chemist, but he actually knew Hi-Potion which was somewhat helpful. Dycedarg used his shield to block several high-powered spells cast by Lenna, and despite all of Faris' successful flirtations it seemed luck was against us.
The second attempt at this battle was even more interesting. I thought taking more care with positioning could make a real difference. I had a lot of good plans, but few of them worked out. Dycedarg still weathered Krile's spells and blocked Lenna's spells. What he couldn't weather as well was the sword strikes of his own charmed knight.
The biggest surprise in all of this is that when Dycedarg transforms into Adramelk, his entourage of knights disappears. However, my charmed knight friend just didn't.
Leopold the knight remained in the battle. He was still charmed when the battle started, and took a good hard swing at Adramelk. His charm wore off shortly after, and I thought that since Leopold can do so much more damage than Faris it made sense to just re-charm Leopold and use him for most of the fighting.
Also somewhat notable: Lenna had reason and opportunity to use an Ether for the first time here. Bartz, Leopold and Faris all surrounded Adramelk. Bartz was able to use Speed Break, Faris kept Leopold charmed, and my mages with their restored MP pools were able to bring out the big guns. Naturally it was Leopold who dealt the killing blow.
Leopold contributed nearly 800 damage against Adramelk, and that doesn't even count his contributions against Dycedarg; he was absolutely the MVP of the battle. Incredible.
Next was Murond Holy Place. I think this might be the only required battle with geomancers in the whole game. Faris immediately charmed the one priest who stands on top of the temple and talks at the beginning. He struck one of his friends, and then to cure his charm someone use geomancy on him, inflicting slow. It was silly.
The battle was a stable one but I made a couple of mad moves consecutively, spending all of Krile's MP on two casts of Holy and then accidentally aiming Reraise on an already-dead Bartz. Despite that, we won.
Inside the Murond temple, we had to fight Vormav, Rofel and Kletian. They're quite strong but also quick to retreat if you target Vormav. Mighty Sword is as annoying as ever.
"Black Robe destroyed? Now my elemental damage is all cut. Well, let's see if I can maybe just nuke Vormav in the back and solve all our problems. Actually, that looks pretty good to me! Let's do that!"
Lenna got ready to incinerate Vormav with Flare, and then Kletian went to counter her spell, so then Bartz attacked Kletian to stop his spell, only to find that Kletian going down causes Vormav to run. It was a strange and very short battle.
The next battle is a tomb-like area under Murond where zombie Zalbag appears. I forgot to re-equip the mages after they had them smashed in the previous battle. Right away, Bartz was affected by Blood Suck (which I discussed a bit in the previous update) and then I said, "Okay, we're Holy and Flare-ing this situation.". Faris charmed an ultima demon and we trained our powerful spells on Zalbag. The demons kept each other busy, and Lenna destroyed Zalbag with Flare.
"Of all my bag-related siblings, you were my favourite."
I proceeded to the endgame at Orbonne, but ran into a random battle at Sweegy Woods. It was against two goblins, one bomb, and one skeleton. I just put the team all on auto-battle right away. It was trivially easy but made an interesting sort of point about how far we had come.
We went into the book storage (fourth floor) at Orbonne Monastery, which begins the endgame sequence of battles - sort of a point of no return. There are monks, knights, and archers. I targetted a bunch of them with an Ice 4, where knights just wandered into the blast radius, and a couple of the other enemies fell in love with Faris.
In general, my choices were good, my positioning was good, and even luck was on my side so this battle was sort of a non-event... besides Faris having her Power Sleeve broken.
Next was the battle with Loffrey/Waffle in the fifth floor underground. It features a lot of mages. Fighting mages isn't too bad; we can benefit from things like Lenna's Counter Magic. I also pointed out that charming a mage has the fun side effect of cancelling their spellcasting, which I quickly put into action with Pado the wizard.
Right after, Faris had a second Power Sleeve smashed, this time by Rofel. Lenna aimed a Flare spell at Rofel, which I knew wouldn't kill him but would likely come close. It was successful, but it was ultimately Rofel's charmed wizard buddy, Pado, who ended the fight for us.
As the room blew up around us: "Where do Pado and Cedric and them go? ... What happened to Pado? Maybe it'll be like Adramelk where he shows up in the next scene! My friend, uh, Leopold... maybe Leopold will be there! Leopold was there when we beat Adramelk. Like, I have to think he's doing okay!"
Sadly, neither Pado nor Leopold joined us in Murond Death City. Before the next battle, I changed Faris' reaction ability to Catch. Since I wanted to keep at least one Power Sleeve around, I instead outfitted Faris with a Judo Outfit. The battle with Kletian includes ninjas, samurai, and time mages. It started out well enough.
For some reason when Kletian was charging Dark Holy against one of my characters I thought the right move was using Magic Break with Bartz instead of just trying to take him out entirely. I don't think I even looked at the viability. I mean, tactically it's interesting at least. And it worked.
Kletian was brought into critical status by Lenna's weak spell and Krile's Holy anyway, and reducing a powerful caster's MA by 3 is great. He has Magic Save though, so he gained one back pretty quickly. It didn't matter; Faris stabbed him to death shortly after.
I kind of wonder what becomes of Kletian's 6 reasonably powerful, still-living henchmen.
This next fight is the rematch with Balk in Lost Sacred Precincts. Balk has chemist allies with guns across a huge battle field, and some powerful monster allies; it's not usually an easy one, in my opinion. We had terrible luck with randomized hydra attacks and magic guns and such, and I reset after a couple of turns when I was down to one unit with no reasonable path to recovery.
On attempt #2, I gave most of the team White Robes to reduce the elemental damage. That helped quite a bit, and Faris seduced a hyudra successfully a couple of times.
The hyudra single-handedly (but triple-headedly) took out the dark behemoth and helped us deal with the tiamat. A random Counter Magic proc really eased up the pressure from the enemy chemist; in general, a lot of things went our way this time. Krile dealt the final blow to Balk with Holy.
Although it's sort of a multi-part battle, this brought us to the final fight-ish. The battle with Hashmalum was easy because this team is actually quite solid when it comes to single-target damage. He dropped a Meteor on us but we got better. Lenna ended the fight with Flare.
This brings us to the real final battle in two parts. Alma joins us and I seem to have forgotten to turn her into a poorly-equipped chemist! Oh well.
Faris once again charmed an ultima demon. Krile tried to cast Holy on Altima but was struck down pretty promptly. My ultima demon ally targetted three demons including itself, but missed on itself, meaning it kept the charmed status - quite a string of things to happen in combination!
Faris charmed another ultima demon shortly after, creating a demonic harem. While Faris was goofing around having a flirty ol' time, Lenna was completely destroying the first form of the final boss with Flare spells. Just two of these and some other incidental hits was enough.
I didn't recognize that my MP-intensive spells on the first form might create problems during the second form. Against final Altima, Lenna only had 30 MP! I was glad, once again, that I took the opportunity to learn to use Ethers earlier. Even though this creature is pretty darn powerful, managing a single opponent definitely feels easy. Bartz took an early opportunity to break its speed.
Krile and Lenna were both throwing out spells. Lenna had elemental boosts from her Black Robe, both had good MA stats, and this was further helped by Altima's Face Up boosting its faith throughout the fight.
I was maybe getting cocky lining up Krile to spend her last few MP on another Holy cast when some of the team was subjected to a pretty bad Grand Cross, including Bartz becoming a poisoned frog.
This ended up making quite a few issues, really. In this game, the frog status even removes your access to the Item command. I kept trying to use Esuna on Bartz, but Krile's MP was very low and Altima kept killing her, which made this a bit of a drawn-out process. Eventually, Altima got bored of physicals and aimed an All-Ultima at us that would've smashed us pretty badly. Although I knew Altima was on the ropes, it was a bit of a last-ditch effort where Lenna aimed one more strong spell at Altima... and Faris walked up and shivved her one more time. It turned out that Faris delivered an epic, world-saving shiv.
At a bit over three years and 16 play sessions, this was my longest game I've played in any of my discussed/streamed variant playthroughs. There were times when it didn't feel fun, as there wasn't always an obvious solution... although this game generally gives you a ton of options for every scenario beyond the first few battles, particularly in vanilla play.
There were also a lot of fun parts. The absolute highlight had to be the battle with Dycedarg/Adramelk as discussed near the top of this update.
We defeated Final Fantasy Tactics using something like a strict party of knight, thief, white mage and black mage. It ended up mostly feeling pretty balanced, actually, at least with my legal secondary item command. I do think having four characters instead of five was pretty darn impactful. I am... not sure I want to do similar on this game again. I don't know. Maybe.
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy Legend II
Faris charmed another ultima demon shortly after, creating a demonic harem. While Faris was goofing around having a flirty ol' time, Lenna was completely destroying the first form of the final boss with Flare spells. Just two of these and some other incidental hits was enough.
I didn't recognize that my MP-intensive spells on the first form might create problems during the second form. Against final Altima, Lenna only had 30 MP! I was glad, once again, that I took the opportunity to learn to use Ethers earlier. Even though this creature is pretty darn powerful, managing a single opponent definitely feels easy. Bartz took an early opportunity to break its speed.
Krile and Lenna were both throwing out spells. Lenna had elemental boosts from her Black Robe, both had good MA stats, and this was further helped by Altima's Face Up boosting its faith throughout the fight.
I was maybe getting cocky lining up Krile to spend her last few MP on another Holy cast when some of the team was subjected to a pretty bad Grand Cross, including Bartz becoming a poisoned frog.
This ended up making quite a few issues, really. In this game, the frog status even removes your access to the Item command. I kept trying to use Esuna on Bartz, but Krile's MP was very low and Altima kept killing her, which made this a bit of a drawn-out process. Eventually, Altima got bored of physicals and aimed an All-Ultima at us that would've smashed us pretty badly. Although I knew Altima was on the ropes, it was a bit of a last-ditch effort where Lenna aimed one more strong spell at Altima... and Faris walked up and shivved her one more time. It turned out that Faris delivered an epic, world-saving shiv.
At a bit over three years and 16 play sessions, this was my longest game I've played in any of my discussed/streamed variant playthroughs. There were times when it didn't feel fun, as there wasn't always an obvious solution... although this game generally gives you a ton of options for every scenario beyond the first few battles, particularly in vanilla play.
There were also a lot of fun parts. The absolute highlight had to be the battle with Dycedarg/Adramelk as discussed near the top of this update.
We defeated Final Fantasy Tactics using something like a strict party of knight, thief, white mage and black mage. It ended up mostly feeling pretty balanced, actually, at least with my legal secondary item command. I do think having four characters instead of five was pretty darn impactful. I am... not sure I want to do similar on this game again. I don't know. Maybe.
The next "Classic Jobs" run that I played, chronologically: Final Fantasy Legend II
