Final Fantasy VIII Classic Jobs Part VIII
Sep. 14th, 2024 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis update is based on gameplay from August 26 through August 30 of 2024. Now it's about 2 weeks later as this is a relatively busy time of year for me; sometimes during September I'm able to find time to play games, but I guess I was a bit underprepared for my usual goings-on and it feels like I've barely been home. (Not helped by playing Peglin instead of this when I have little bursts of time.)
There are three main problems with this:
Regardless of point #1, I'd like to get this posted because waiting even longer ain't going to help! And it may be a while before I'm able to bring this playthrough to the end.
So, obviously after the previous update, I fought the Gigantuar. Or, uh, Jumbo Cactuar. I had Zell Armageddon Fist for part of the fight, but he was outfitted as a mage at the time so that wasn't particularly effective. Squall was Renzokuken'ing when he could and that helped.
The real MVP here ended up being Quistis. Her Mighty Guard was giving us great effects like Protect, Haste and Aura, and even set up as a thief her Aqua Breath was sometimes hitting well over 6000 damage.
The big jerk did escape once, forcing a do-over. This was somewhat time-consuming but not especially challenging.
I only had two GFs remaining to get: Bahamut and Eden. Getting Bahamut seemed pretty attainable!
With the Ruby Dragons in mind, I entered the Deep Sea Research Centre with Quistis as a thief, Zell as a white mage and Squall as a black mage with intent to minimize fire damage where possible and inflict blind and slow status. Really, a knight would've been an asset here (for more fire resistance) but I guess I was focusing on status inflictions. Perhaps I also thought the steals would be valuable, but in this playthrough, they are not.
I think I dodged all of the light-induced encounters except for one. Then I had to fight Bahamut's Ruby Dragon goons. The first one was fairly tough although Squall was able to stand up to it and Zell was able to get everyone back in fighting shape.
For some reason the second Ruby Dragon we fought, as I noticed quickly by its draw list, was much lower levelled. It was barely an issue at all.
Then we had this thing with the hidden dialogue thing. Does everyone else not find these prompts like completely stupid? Every piece of dialogue surrounding Bahamut is meaningless and relates to nothing else in this game. It's just that weird FF8 flavour of edgy nothingness.
Anyway, Bahamut. This was fine. He was quickly blinded and slowed by our attacks, so there was nothing very special about the fight.
Since Quistis was outfitted as a thief with better physical stats than magical ones, when she was able, I tried using Gatling Gun instead of other attacks... with "meh" results.
Then for some reason Bahamut says "Have you seen the light...?" - which might be meaningless, or maybe he's referring to the giant lightbulb in the room that we clearly had to see to get here? This is the stupidest ultimate dragon ever. This text means we won.
After getting Bahamut, apparently I hadn't junctioned or set up my Cactuar GF yet. I wanted to ensure sure that my GFs were fully in line with my actual requirements. The Hyne save editor I was using to get setup at the beginning was very fickle about not allowing me to unlearn Cactuar's Bonus abilities, so I had to use Amnesia Greens to get rid of those.
Doing this felt strange.
This is how Cactuar's ability list looked afterwards, which was ideal for me:
And here is my nice, full list of GFs at this point, with levels all over the place:
At this point, while I knew I wanted to try to get Eden before Disc 4 (where only one short dungeon remains before that), I felt underprepared for the sidequest where you get Eden. I was coming to terms with how many sidequests I actually wanted to do and balancing that with what each of them had to offer: I'm not 100%ing the game, and my magic lists are almost full. I'm not going to bother chasing down every card. However, since I've got such narrow lists of available magic with 2 knights, 2 white mages, 1 thief, and 1 black mage to outfit, I may as well collect as much of that magic as possible to give myself a full loadout representative of these jobs, as well as making the game easier for me.
Here's a reminder of those available spells:
One of my knights still had room to stock a lot more of the -ara level elemental spells, and I don't have enough Magic Stones to refine all of the Blizzaras in particular. One knight needs Drain. I could use some more Triples and Berserks for the second white mage, too. And I'd really like the two knights and the two white mages to have 100 Holy each, since that's quite a strong junction for stats. For my knights, Holy will provide them the best offensive power possible. If I happen to get some Auras for white mages and Ultima for the black mage, that's a bonus!
With all of that in mind we are going on a world tour of magic collection!
I thought I would start with the Island Closest to Hell. I made a pretty stupid mistake here, removing the thief job from the party since thief had absolutely zero spells left to stock. Well, guess what? Thief is the exclusive user of Enc-None, which I just got access to for the first time since it's only available to Bahamut. Absentmindly removing my thief was going to land me in a bunch of encounters with particularly tough level 100 enemies here! I didn't even remember why and thought, "Maybe Enc-None doesn't work on the Island Closest to Hell." Of course it does, I was just dumb.
Anyway... I had to do a few level 100 enemy fights here, which had both good and bad to it. It's hard to stock in these fights, and tough enemies like Malboros don't actually offer any useful rewards anymore. But it's kind of cool that we can win, maybe with a bit of luck.
Soon after, I fought my very first Blue Dragon - at level 100. Amazingly, Odin showed up. I believe I was able to get a Fury Fragment from this which would be useful.
It didn't take long for me to decide that Island Closest to Hell wasn't a good idea right now... although I would return later after realizing the error I had made. What I instead decided to do was try and find some Blitzes in Centra to get Power Generators to learn Ray-Bomb for Quistis and perhaps some Pulse Ammo to either use with Irvine or get Squall's best weapon.
Squall always gets over-levelled for me in this game, which, like, of course he does. He's forced into the party and enemies level relative to the party average. But little, focused side trips like finding Malboros in Esthar earlier and the approximate hour I spent looking for Blitzes in Centra made him creep over level 80. Hm. More on that later, probably.
In Centra, I was able to ensure that 2 white mages and 2 knights all had full stacks of Reflect, which can be nice for Status Def-J, HP-J, and Spr-J.
I fought a lot of enemies here, including a lot of Blitzes. Eventually I sort of... lost interest in Power Generators. Ray-Bomb wasn't amazingly important to Quistis and there are other ways to get Pulse Ammo... like Energy Crystals. I had two of those, so I did a couple more weapon upgrades, including getting the Lion Heart.
Energy Crystals... right! I can fight Elnoyles now. I decided we'd go to Esthar and wander the streets to fight Elnoyles. Once again, I fought Iron Giants and Turtapods and Imps for ages and ages without Elnoyles showing up. This was nice for getting my first couple of Star Fragments but contributed to Squall's level imbalance.
I had also been using Zell and Quistis for a long time without realizing it - maybe because it sort of seemed like nothing has actually happened since getting the Ragnarok. Now Squall is level 90, Zell and Quistis have levels in the high 60s and Rinoa still in the 20s! Oops. I'll give Selphie a shot for a while.
In all of this, I never actually found an Elnoyle. However, there's a dude in Esthar city who just stays there who will summon one Elnoyle every time you re-enter the screen and talk to him. I abused this to get 100 Holys on both white mages and both knights, as well as to get some Energy Crystals and a Moon Stone.
Squall became pretty strong in this process.
What now? Let's fight some Wendigos to fill up on Berserks.
Now let's go to the Trabia area to fight a Snow Lion again. That should get us some Blizzaras.
Huh, I didn't know there were Blue Dragons here. That's useful and fun. With Drain, Blizzara, Holy and Reflect I think our two knights are essentially maxed out.
Well, now we've basically got everything we could possibly need except rarities like Aura, Triple, and Ultima. We've got partial stacks of each of those, but to fill them up I guess we should wander the Islands Closest to Various Afterlives. And that's what we did, with no encounters this time!
We don't have 100 of those rare spells, but we're getting there.
Finally, since we're quite close to fully upgrading most of the team's weapons, we ought to get some Adamantine. I went back to Long Horn Island (I think?) to fight Adamantoises. Even as upgraded as we are, these very defensive enemies sometimes take ages to defeat. But, eventually we beat them and got what we needed. The key was using Meteor Strike as a part of Zell's Duel, which divides that enemy's HP by some proportion.
The only weapon that still needs any form of upgrade is Rinoa's and we're just missing one Windmill for that.
The whole team is nearly fully decked out! In some scenarios though, like high-defense enemies and the level 100 enemies on the Island Closest to Hell, we are really starting to feel the impacts of the limitations of this playthrough. I'm not too nervous about endgame... but I am nervous about the depths of the Deep Sea Research Center.
Oh well. We're giving it a shot.
I chose to avoid bringing Zell since he can cause the encounter rate to spike in the bottom levels depending on your choices. There was nothing special here until we got through all the steam door things.
The lower levels here all feature enemies who are a bit higher than the average party level. Squall's level being more than double Selphie's and Irvine's means that encounters that aren't too tough for him result in Selphie and Irvine being radically underpowered, and when they die it's not balanced for Squall alone. As well, be mindful that my characters don't generally have nearly as many junctions available as a typical late-game party would have. Selphie's setup as a thief around this point was like this (snapped before her upgrade to Strange Vision):
Having Death junctioned to attack was a real asset in some fights. Her defenses were generally poor though, and she has no means to protect herself from most status effects nor elemental attacks. I truly felt like I had to get lucky to win in a lot of the fights here and I think it took me most of ten tries to get from the save point after the steam doors to the hidden save point near the bottom.
I used Mega Phoenixes from time-to-time when everyone was clobbered by Iron Giants' sword swipes... and I'd still lose, at least some of the time.
That said, managing status effects was huge. I changed Selphie's status attack to Blind and Irvine's to Sleep and nice things like this would happen.
While some other enemies like Tri-Faces could be scary at times, the encounter with two Iron Giants probably wrecked my team the most.
Eventually we got to the bottom! I didn't remember whether Ultima Weapon was legitimately hard in this game or not although I was nervous after how many tries it took to get to that bottommost hidden save point. I don't think I had trouble as a teenager, but then again I had things like junctions for nearly all stats, access to strong spells on all characters, and a Revive command.
It started well enough but my first attempt, using Quistis, Irvine and Squall, was a failure. I don't remember the specific strategy here, but I seem to have used the one Hero (temporary invincibility) from my inventory on Quistis. She was a black mage in this fight and I wanted her to draw lots of Ultimas. We did not survive.
I realized I'd need to be more strategic and this was the setup for my next few attempts:
Ultima Weapon has fierce physical attacks, so I thought Zell using Defend and covering another character with critical HP might be a path to victory. I wanted Squall to have the reasonably high attack value provided by thief, and Quistis is a black mage mostly so I can try to hoard Ultima spells. This doesn't really work - in part - because Defend doesn't guard against much of what Ultima Weapon does.
This didn't even come close over several attempts.
This is where I left off and, as I noted at the beginning, I haven't played this in over 2 weeks. I've been doing a bit of "shower thinking" and other background processing and I've got some ideas to explore when I keep going:
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There are three main problems with this:
- I didn't get as far as I wanted before writing this update, as you may be able to tell by the end of this post.
- I haven't played this in two weeks; I'm sort of reminding myself of what happened with my screenshots.
- Briefly, my image upload partly failed! I thought I was going to have to piece this together with roughly half of the screenshots missing and the rest in random order. I seem to have managed to fix this aspect. Y'know what? That still would've been less of a mess than this game's plot.
Regardless of point #1, I'd like to get this posted because waiting even longer ain't going to help! And it may be a while before I'm able to bring this playthrough to the end.
So, obviously after the previous update, I fought the Gigantuar. Or, uh, Jumbo Cactuar. I had Zell Armageddon Fist for part of the fight, but he was outfitted as a mage at the time so that wasn't particularly effective. Squall was Renzokuken'ing when he could and that helped.
The real MVP here ended up being Quistis. Her Mighty Guard was giving us great effects like Protect, Haste and Aura, and even set up as a thief her Aqua Breath was sometimes hitting well over 6000 damage.
The big jerk did escape once, forcing a do-over. This was somewhat time-consuming but not especially challenging.
I only had two GFs remaining to get: Bahamut and Eden. Getting Bahamut seemed pretty attainable!
With the Ruby Dragons in mind, I entered the Deep Sea Research Centre with Quistis as a thief, Zell as a white mage and Squall as a black mage with intent to minimize fire damage where possible and inflict blind and slow status. Really, a knight would've been an asset here (for more fire resistance) but I guess I was focusing on status inflictions. Perhaps I also thought the steals would be valuable, but in this playthrough, they are not.
I think I dodged all of the light-induced encounters except for one. Then I had to fight Bahamut's Ruby Dragon goons. The first one was fairly tough although Squall was able to stand up to it and Zell was able to get everyone back in fighting shape.
For some reason the second Ruby Dragon we fought, as I noticed quickly by its draw list, was much lower levelled. It was barely an issue at all.
Then we had this thing with the hidden dialogue thing. Does everyone else not find these prompts like completely stupid? Every piece of dialogue surrounding Bahamut is meaningless and relates to nothing else in this game. It's just that weird FF8 flavour of edgy nothingness.
Anyway, Bahamut. This was fine. He was quickly blinded and slowed by our attacks, so there was nothing very special about the fight.
Since Quistis was outfitted as a thief with better physical stats than magical ones, when she was able, I tried using Gatling Gun instead of other attacks... with "meh" results.
Then for some reason Bahamut says "Have you seen the light...?" - which might be meaningless, or maybe he's referring to the giant lightbulb in the room that we clearly had to see to get here? This is the stupidest ultimate dragon ever. This text means we won.
After getting Bahamut, apparently I hadn't junctioned or set up my Cactuar GF yet. I wanted to ensure sure that my GFs were fully in line with my actual requirements. The Hyne save editor I was using to get setup at the beginning was very fickle about not allowing me to unlearn Cactuar's Bonus abilities, so I had to use Amnesia Greens to get rid of those.
Doing this felt strange.
This is how Cactuar's ability list looked afterwards, which was ideal for me:
And here is my nice, full list of GFs at this point, with levels all over the place:
At this point, while I knew I wanted to try to get Eden before Disc 4 (where only one short dungeon remains before that), I felt underprepared for the sidequest where you get Eden. I was coming to terms with how many sidequests I actually wanted to do and balancing that with what each of them had to offer: I'm not 100%ing the game, and my magic lists are almost full. I'm not going to bother chasing down every card. However, since I've got such narrow lists of available magic with 2 knights, 2 white mages, 1 thief, and 1 black mage to outfit, I may as well collect as much of that magic as possible to give myself a full loadout representative of these jobs, as well as making the game easier for me.
Here's a reminder of those available spells:
| Class | Spells |
|---|---|
| Knight | Fire, Fira, Blizzard, Blizzara, Thunder, Thundara, Holy, Cure, Esuna, Protect, Shell, Reflect, Drain |
| Thief | Aero, Bio, Scan, Sleep, Blind, Silence, Death, Double, Triple, Float, Haste, Slow, Stop |
| White Mage | Holy, Cure, Cura, Curaga, Life, Full-Life, Regen, Esuna, Scan, Silence, Confuse, Berserk, Double, Triple, Dispel, Protect, Shell, Reflect, Float, Haste, Slow, Zombie, Aura |
| Black Mage | Fire, Fira, Firaga, Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizzaga, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga, Water, Aero, Bio, Demi, Quake, Tornado, Flare, Meteor, Ultima, Sleep, Blind, Confuse, Break, Death, Double, Triple, Drain, Slow, Stop, Meltdown, Pain |
With all of that in mind we are going on a world tour of magic collection!
I thought I would start with the Island Closest to Hell. I made a pretty stupid mistake here, removing the thief job from the party since thief had absolutely zero spells left to stock. Well, guess what? Thief is the exclusive user of Enc-None, which I just got access to for the first time since it's only available to Bahamut. Absentmindly removing my thief was going to land me in a bunch of encounters with particularly tough level 100 enemies here! I didn't even remember why and thought, "Maybe Enc-None doesn't work on the Island Closest to Hell." Of course it does, I was just dumb.
Anyway... I had to do a few level 100 enemy fights here, which had both good and bad to it. It's hard to stock in these fights, and tough enemies like Malboros don't actually offer any useful rewards anymore. But it's kind of cool that we can win, maybe with a bit of luck.
Soon after, I fought my very first Blue Dragon - at level 100. Amazingly, Odin showed up. I believe I was able to get a Fury Fragment from this which would be useful.
It didn't take long for me to decide that Island Closest to Hell wasn't a good idea right now... although I would return later after realizing the error I had made. What I instead decided to do was try and find some Blitzes in Centra to get Power Generators to learn Ray-Bomb for Quistis and perhaps some Pulse Ammo to either use with Irvine or get Squall's best weapon.
Squall always gets over-levelled for me in this game, which, like, of course he does. He's forced into the party and enemies level relative to the party average. But little, focused side trips like finding Malboros in Esthar earlier and the approximate hour I spent looking for Blitzes in Centra made him creep over level 80. Hm. More on that later, probably.
In Centra, I was able to ensure that 2 white mages and 2 knights all had full stacks of Reflect, which can be nice for Status Def-J, HP-J, and Spr-J.
I fought a lot of enemies here, including a lot of Blitzes. Eventually I sort of... lost interest in Power Generators. Ray-Bomb wasn't amazingly important to Quistis and there are other ways to get Pulse Ammo... like Energy Crystals. I had two of those, so I did a couple more weapon upgrades, including getting the Lion Heart.
Energy Crystals... right! I can fight Elnoyles now. I decided we'd go to Esthar and wander the streets to fight Elnoyles. Once again, I fought Iron Giants and Turtapods and Imps for ages and ages without Elnoyles showing up. This was nice for getting my first couple of Star Fragments but contributed to Squall's level imbalance.
I had also been using Zell and Quistis for a long time without realizing it - maybe because it sort of seemed like nothing has actually happened since getting the Ragnarok. Now Squall is level 90, Zell and Quistis have levels in the high 60s and Rinoa still in the 20s! Oops. I'll give Selphie a shot for a while.
In all of this, I never actually found an Elnoyle. However, there's a dude in Esthar city who just stays there who will summon one Elnoyle every time you re-enter the screen and talk to him. I abused this to get 100 Holys on both white mages and both knights, as well as to get some Energy Crystals and a Moon Stone.
Squall became pretty strong in this process.
What now? Let's fight some Wendigos to fill up on Berserks.
Now let's go to the Trabia area to fight a Snow Lion again. That should get us some Blizzaras.
Huh, I didn't know there were Blue Dragons here. That's useful and fun. With Drain, Blizzara, Holy and Reflect I think our two knights are essentially maxed out.
Well, now we've basically got everything we could possibly need except rarities like Aura, Triple, and Ultima. We've got partial stacks of each of those, but to fill them up I guess we should wander the Islands Closest to Various Afterlives. And that's what we did, with no encounters this time!
We don't have 100 of those rare spells, but we're getting there.
Finally, since we're quite close to fully upgrading most of the team's weapons, we ought to get some Adamantine. I went back to Long Horn Island (I think?) to fight Adamantoises. Even as upgraded as we are, these very defensive enemies sometimes take ages to defeat. But, eventually we beat them and got what we needed. The key was using Meteor Strike as a part of Zell's Duel, which divides that enemy's HP by some proportion.
The only weapon that still needs any form of upgrade is Rinoa's and we're just missing one Windmill for that.
The whole team is nearly fully decked out! In some scenarios though, like high-defense enemies and the level 100 enemies on the Island Closest to Hell, we are really starting to feel the impacts of the limitations of this playthrough. I'm not too nervous about endgame... but I am nervous about the depths of the Deep Sea Research Center.
Oh well. We're giving it a shot.
I chose to avoid bringing Zell since he can cause the encounter rate to spike in the bottom levels depending on your choices. There was nothing special here until we got through all the steam door things.
The lower levels here all feature enemies who are a bit higher than the average party level. Squall's level being more than double Selphie's and Irvine's means that encounters that aren't too tough for him result in Selphie and Irvine being radically underpowered, and when they die it's not balanced for Squall alone. As well, be mindful that my characters don't generally have nearly as many junctions available as a typical late-game party would have. Selphie's setup as a thief around this point was like this (snapped before her upgrade to Strange Vision):
Having Death junctioned to attack was a real asset in some fights. Her defenses were generally poor though, and she has no means to protect herself from most status effects nor elemental attacks. I truly felt like I had to get lucky to win in a lot of the fights here and I think it took me most of ten tries to get from the save point after the steam doors to the hidden save point near the bottom.
I used Mega Phoenixes from time-to-time when everyone was clobbered by Iron Giants' sword swipes... and I'd still lose, at least some of the time.
That said, managing status effects was huge. I changed Selphie's status attack to Blind and Irvine's to Sleep and nice things like this would happen.
While some other enemies like Tri-Faces could be scary at times, the encounter with two Iron Giants probably wrecked my team the most.
Eventually we got to the bottom! I didn't remember whether Ultima Weapon was legitimately hard in this game or not although I was nervous after how many tries it took to get to that bottommost hidden save point. I don't think I had trouble as a teenager, but then again I had things like junctions for nearly all stats, access to strong spells on all characters, and a Revive command.
It started well enough but my first attempt, using Quistis, Irvine and Squall, was a failure. I don't remember the specific strategy here, but I seem to have used the one Hero (temporary invincibility) from my inventory on Quistis. She was a black mage in this fight and I wanted her to draw lots of Ultimas. We did not survive.
I realized I'd need to be more strategic and this was the setup for my next few attempts:
Ultima Weapon has fierce physical attacks, so I thought Zell using Defend and covering another character with critical HP might be a path to victory. I wanted Squall to have the reasonably high attack value provided by thief, and Quistis is a black mage mostly so I can try to hoard Ultima spells. This doesn't really work - in part - because Defend doesn't guard against much of what Ultima Weapon does.
This didn't even come close over several attempts.
This is where I left off and, as I noted at the beginning, I haven't played this in over 2 weeks. I've been doing a bit of "shower thinking" and other background processing and I've got some ideas to explore when I keep going:
- I was more successful with Irvine on the team than with my three strongest characters. Perhaps I should lean on my lower-levelled Irvine and/or Selphie and see if I can dull the fight a little bit... supposing Ultima Weapon's level is even affected.
- I should probably focus more on offense and less on defense; a good idea might be utterly maxing Zell's strength, putting the Hero on him, and then using Duel/Armageddon Fist. That's worth a try.
- I would probably be wise to not even bother stocking Ultima. Besides casting Meltdown, black mage has very little to offer in this battle.
- If worse came to worst, I could get out of here, go get the Gilgamesh card, and I'm sure I could cheese the fight using its Card Mod yields. I don't want to have to do that though. I hope there's a better way.
- I did a whole update covering hours of gameplay and I never actually did rescue Rinoa. I wonder if there might be any benefit in getting her first?
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