Final Fantasy VIII Classic Jobs Part IX
Sep. 23rd, 2024 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingAfter recently updating on the previous play session with a weeks-long break in between, I happened to be away from home for a few days with my Miyoo Mini and I continued the run a bit on September 21st. This was great because I had just done several unsuccessful attempts at Ultima Weapon and at the end of that prior post I talked about some background processing I was doing to find a solution.
First things first, we have to deal with Ultima Weapon.
I mentioned I ought to prioritize offense for Zell and then use the Armageddon Fist technique of using the absolute fastest possible Duel inputs to optimize damage. Zell was a knight, Squall was a thief, and Quistis was a black mage. I had one Hero item and two Aura Stones, so my plan was to use an Aura Stone and then a Hero on Zell. I also threw out the other Aura Stone on Squall although that didn't matter because he got Meteor'd. I enjoyed seeing the Meteors missing Zell.
With my levels the way they were, Zell's Booya and Heel Drop attacks were doing roughly 1500 damage a pop, but sometimes they would be critical. I am fairly good at fast inputs on these, often doing three per second. Thus, when we had 12 seconds of Duel time, this was over 50,000 damage.
This was actually my third attempt this day when I got the items used with the right timing to survive and enact this strategy. After using the items, Squall - with his thiefy high speed - was able to draw Eden. When the Hero wore off, I needed more offense. As people went down, and they did, someone would use a Mega Phoenix. With everyone in critical status and thus able to use their Limit Breaks reliably, I thought black mage Quistis could throw out some Ultimas for extra damage.
I didn't bother with healing at this point. We had probably done 150,000 damage, mostly with Zell's Duel attacks, so we went full offensive. Squall was chipping in with Renzokuken, too, but Lionheart didn't come up; that would've been a slick finish.
We now have access to the final GF, Eden. Unlike Cactuar, all of its abilities properly fit the black mage role that it was intended for.
Since I happened to win the Ultima Stones instead of the Three Stars - either of which would've been great - I went ahead and maxed out my Ultima spells for my black mage.
We still had to walk out of here, but we didn't run into enemies. I don't even know if I had Enc-None on, I think the enemies are just gone after Ultima Weapon.
What now? Let's finish the only worthwhile sidequest before we proceed with the story, in which we're quite close to this game's point of no return.
We went to FH to access Balamb Garden for the CC Group quest. On the way we met Martine.
We continued with the CC Group, talked to the inspirational Dr. Kadowaki, and met King. We won that match, and also battled the King again after to ensure we had the Gilgamesh card, which will be extra nice if I decide to fight Omega Weapon. This was sort of the real, major prize in this whole quest for my purposes.
Since I was here though I thought I'd also defeat Joker.
What else? Well, before proceeding I went to Galbadia where I remembered encountering many of those big blue bird thingies and got a Windmill so I could do my final weapon upgrade.
And I wandered the Islands Closest to Hell and Heaven just to stock up on Triples and Auras a little bit.
One of our white mages currently has 73 Triples and the other has 100. We're quite a bit lower on Aura spells. The two knights, the thief, and the black mage all have 100 stocks of every spell they can legally carry. This means our toolbox of options for things like status attacks/defense, elements, and stats is basically the best it's going to get.
Enough lollygagging! Let's rescue Rinoa. It's funny the way this big dramatic moment happens with basically no barrier at all, you just sort of walk in and take her.
The little scene on the Ragnarok afterward is maybe one of the best, where the characters are engaging meaningfully and actually showing evidence of personality and even development in some cases. I took a couple of screencaps here but I missed a few legitimately great bits like Rinoa explaining her embarrassment, and Selphie saying, "Yeah, happy is good."
Then we went to Edea's house for no real reason in particular as far as I could tell except that it's where someone envisioned this conversation happening. Maybe they'd already started animating the game's opening FMV.
Back to Esthar. We fought in a mall. Rinoa's here at level 29.
Then we met the president, who may be a moron. We beat him in a card game.
I'm keeping a separate save before the point of no return, which is more-or-less here:
We let Selphie wreck things in a pretty fun sequence, and entered the Lunatic Pandora ourselves. Squall is a knight, Rinoa is a thief, and Irvine is a black mage (I realize these were not super optimized choices). We were quickly greeted by Raijin and Fujin. Although I did try stealing from them and got some goodies of little consequence (Megaelixirs are nice but actually pretty easy to accumulate at this point if you really wanted to), battles feel pretty straightforward when there's nothing to stock. This is also a lot easier than the fights I was doing on Islands Closest and the Deep Sea Research Center.
Lunatic Pandora is somewhat confusing, but then again we've been here before! Twice, sort of. Honestly though my previous trips didn't help. But it was kind of nice finding familiar things like this draw point:
I came down on the elevator in the middle, marked with a "02". Since I recalled accidentally leaving the place very quickly on my prior trip where I had gone left into elevator "01", I decided intentionally to go with the elevator marked with a "03" first this time!
I was doing fights here, mainly because I had my very underlevelled friend Rinoa with me. Unfortunately the fights are terrible; I vaguely recalled that for some reason on this specific trip the enemies are all incredibly low-levelled and thus not really beneficial to us at all, yielding 1 or 2 experience points sometimes.
After this point, I put on Enc-None. As I wandered around I sort of realized with this game's relative lack of items to pick-up outside of battle and with us only needing to draw Triple or Aura, there was really no point in exploring and my routing through this place felt like a gigantic waste of time. I did find Combat King 005... but I had bought a copy of it in Esthar ages ago.
Okay, time for elevator "01" and that stupid boss I found before.
Surely this time I'd be more ready for it, right?
Oh.
So, the issue here was that Rinoa stole Vit Ups from one of the side pods and couldn't steal successfully from the other one. I got a bit obsessed about it and thought I should make Squall and Irvine kill the side pod she'd stolen from while we waited. There's a good chance that her steal odds were poor because of her low level, when I think about it. I provoked a few nasty counterattacks in this process and left myself underprepared for some of this enemy's nastier mode-change attacks.
Attempt 2 went much better, although I never did manage to steal from that 2nd side pod.
We found Seifer. Squall asked Seifer to give up his ill-defined, class-based variant gameplay.
Then Odin had a whoopsie.
The fight with Seifer was quite amusing. Rinoa was still outfitted as a thief, so using Angel Wing would be foolish. Semi-accidentally, Angelo ended up being the MVP of this fight by a mile. He used Invincible Moon twice...
...revived Rinoa twice with Angelo Reverse...
...suplexed the crap out of Seifer, repeatedly...
...and even stopped to find an item.
I swear I've never gotten this much use out of Angelo ever before. He quite possibly dealt more damage than the rest of the team. This whole thing is hilarious: A giant knight on a monstrous horse got instantly chopped in half but Rinoa summoned her friendly collie to fight the same guy like 10 times.
Because of Angelo's efforts, we soon met a random guy with swords.
We began Disc 4 here. Somehow, we had another bad fight against Adel and not even because of killing Rinoa or anything. Honestly, I don't remember what specifically went wrong.
Take 2! We had saved at the disc transition so restarting was quick. I chose to emphasize offense and Irvine dealt some excellent damage with Shot that ended the fight quickly.
We did the time compression part of the game. It's weird but I guess that's the point. I don't really know what's going on with the series of "sorceress" battles, but the melting backgrounds are cool. We won pretty easily. Irvine sealed the deal at the end with Shot, which is great because I was scared of the countdown.
Now we're in the future, I think. I forgot about these portals. I know there's something you do here to get back to the Ragnarok, and that's fun, but I'm just going to skip that. I think I have what I need.
I made my parties: the high-levelled team of Squall the knight, Zell the thief, and Quistis the white mage (each choice intended to augment their Limit Breaks), and the low-levelled team of Irvine the knight, Rinoa the white mage, and Selphie the black mage.
I'm not sure whether segregating by strength is the best thing to do here or not. Oh well.
I arranged Rinoa's spell list so that if I were to use Angel Wing, she'd have really high odds of selecting Holy.
I also swapped Squall and Irvine into the middle position in their teams since that's the nature of how Cover works in this game.
I don't remember Ultimecia's Castle very well at all, but I did remember that Sphinxaur is in the first room and that it was balanced to be beaten by attacking with basically anything.
I unlocked Item, since that's one of few things that are fairly universal for me. Then things got... worse.
My vague memories of this area is that it's utterly swamped with bosses and you wander through and the first few bosses are designed to be beaten with few abilities. But it took me ages to find a second boss - or that's how it felt? - and when I did it was Tri-Point who totally wrecked my strong team!
As you may be able to tell I ran into Tri-Point multiple times just trying to leave! And I hadn't unlocked the ability to revive or save yet. Quistis was running... a lot.
Um, okay. As soon as I could, I switched to Team Weak. They did great, actually, and they even fought quite a few randoms.
They walked and walked and walked without really finding anything, when we came upon... Tiamat.
We didn't fight her though! Not yet. I was thinking to myself, "Isn't Tiamat literally right before the final boss?", as that's how I remembered it. We might've been able to win but I figured I must've somehow walked around 5 or more bosses. So I wandered backward from there.
Choosing a different route, the very next guy I found was Red Giant.
So we fought Red Giant for, um, 20 minutes or so. Maybe more. He was blinded by Selphie, so he wasn't really hurting us. Selphie and Rinoa could attack for ~10 damage each, and Irvine was doing ~120 or so. I only had Attack and Item available though, not even Limit Breaks. Since I had tons of Ultima Stones, I even tried getting my mages to throw some Ultima spells out.
Even Ultima used by a full-powered Black Mage only did ~150 damage. What an impasse. Boy was I relieved when a sword suddenly fell from above..!
Gilgamesh will help us! He grabbed his trusty... Zantetsuken... and missed.
Y'know what? Forget this crap. We're going to start over, look more thoroughly for the early bosses, and unlock better abilities earlier so we stop getting blocked like this. We'll do this castle end-to-end next time.
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First things first, we have to deal with Ultima Weapon.
I mentioned I ought to prioritize offense for Zell and then use the Armageddon Fist technique of using the absolute fastest possible Duel inputs to optimize damage. Zell was a knight, Squall was a thief, and Quistis was a black mage. I had one Hero item and two Aura Stones, so my plan was to use an Aura Stone and then a Hero on Zell. I also threw out the other Aura Stone on Squall although that didn't matter because he got Meteor'd. I enjoyed seeing the Meteors missing Zell.
With my levels the way they were, Zell's Booya and Heel Drop attacks were doing roughly 1500 damage a pop, but sometimes they would be critical. I am fairly good at fast inputs on these, often doing three per second. Thus, when we had 12 seconds of Duel time, this was over 50,000 damage.
This was actually my third attempt this day when I got the items used with the right timing to survive and enact this strategy. After using the items, Squall - with his thiefy high speed - was able to draw Eden. When the Hero wore off, I needed more offense. As people went down, and they did, someone would use a Mega Phoenix. With everyone in critical status and thus able to use their Limit Breaks reliably, I thought black mage Quistis could throw out some Ultimas for extra damage.
I didn't bother with healing at this point. We had probably done 150,000 damage, mostly with Zell's Duel attacks, so we went full offensive. Squall was chipping in with Renzokuken, too, but Lionheart didn't come up; that would've been a slick finish.
We now have access to the final GF, Eden. Unlike Cactuar, all of its abilities properly fit the black mage role that it was intended for.
Since I happened to win the Ultima Stones instead of the Three Stars - either of which would've been great - I went ahead and maxed out my Ultima spells for my black mage.
We still had to walk out of here, but we didn't run into enemies. I don't even know if I had Enc-None on, I think the enemies are just gone after Ultima Weapon.
What now? Let's finish the only worthwhile sidequest before we proceed with the story, in which we're quite close to this game's point of no return.
We went to FH to access Balamb Garden for the CC Group quest. On the way we met Martine.
We continued with the CC Group, talked to the inspirational Dr. Kadowaki, and met King. We won that match, and also battled the King again after to ensure we had the Gilgamesh card, which will be extra nice if I decide to fight Omega Weapon. This was sort of the real, major prize in this whole quest for my purposes.
Since I was here though I thought I'd also defeat Joker.
What else? Well, before proceeding I went to Galbadia where I remembered encountering many of those big blue bird thingies and got a Windmill so I could do my final weapon upgrade.
And I wandered the Islands Closest to Hell and Heaven just to stock up on Triples and Auras a little bit.
One of our white mages currently has 73 Triples and the other has 100. We're quite a bit lower on Aura spells. The two knights, the thief, and the black mage all have 100 stocks of every spell they can legally carry. This means our toolbox of options for things like status attacks/defense, elements, and stats is basically the best it's going to get.
Enough lollygagging! Let's rescue Rinoa. It's funny the way this big dramatic moment happens with basically no barrier at all, you just sort of walk in and take her.
The little scene on the Ragnarok afterward is maybe one of the best, where the characters are engaging meaningfully and actually showing evidence of personality and even development in some cases. I took a couple of screencaps here but I missed a few legitimately great bits like Rinoa explaining her embarrassment, and Selphie saying, "Yeah, happy is good."
Then we went to Edea's house for no real reason in particular as far as I could tell except that it's where someone envisioned this conversation happening. Maybe they'd already started animating the game's opening FMV.
Back to Esthar. We fought in a mall. Rinoa's here at level 29.
Then we met the president, who may be a moron. We beat him in a card game.
I'm keeping a separate save before the point of no return, which is more-or-less here:
We let Selphie wreck things in a pretty fun sequence, and entered the Lunatic Pandora ourselves. Squall is a knight, Rinoa is a thief, and Irvine is a black mage (I realize these were not super optimized choices). We were quickly greeted by Raijin and Fujin. Although I did try stealing from them and got some goodies of little consequence (Megaelixirs are nice but actually pretty easy to accumulate at this point if you really wanted to), battles feel pretty straightforward when there's nothing to stock. This is also a lot easier than the fights I was doing on Islands Closest and the Deep Sea Research Center.
Lunatic Pandora is somewhat confusing, but then again we've been here before! Twice, sort of. Honestly though my previous trips didn't help. But it was kind of nice finding familiar things like this draw point:
I came down on the elevator in the middle, marked with a "02". Since I recalled accidentally leaving the place very quickly on my prior trip where I had gone left into elevator "01", I decided intentionally to go with the elevator marked with a "03" first this time!
I was doing fights here, mainly because I had my very underlevelled friend Rinoa with me. Unfortunately the fights are terrible; I vaguely recalled that for some reason on this specific trip the enemies are all incredibly low-levelled and thus not really beneficial to us at all, yielding 1 or 2 experience points sometimes.
After this point, I put on Enc-None. As I wandered around I sort of realized with this game's relative lack of items to pick-up outside of battle and with us only needing to draw Triple or Aura, there was really no point in exploring and my routing through this place felt like a gigantic waste of time. I did find Combat King 005... but I had bought a copy of it in Esthar ages ago.
Okay, time for elevator "01" and that stupid boss I found before.
Surely this time I'd be more ready for it, right?
Oh.
So, the issue here was that Rinoa stole Vit Ups from one of the side pods and couldn't steal successfully from the other one. I got a bit obsessed about it and thought I should make Squall and Irvine kill the side pod she'd stolen from while we waited. There's a good chance that her steal odds were poor because of her low level, when I think about it. I provoked a few nasty counterattacks in this process and left myself underprepared for some of this enemy's nastier mode-change attacks.
Attempt 2 went much better, although I never did manage to steal from that 2nd side pod.
We found Seifer. Squall asked Seifer to give up his ill-defined, class-based variant gameplay.
Then Odin had a whoopsie.
The fight with Seifer was quite amusing. Rinoa was still outfitted as a thief, so using Angel Wing would be foolish. Semi-accidentally, Angelo ended up being the MVP of this fight by a mile. He used Invincible Moon twice...
...revived Rinoa twice with Angelo Reverse...
...suplexed the crap out of Seifer, repeatedly...
...and even stopped to find an item.
I swear I've never gotten this much use out of Angelo ever before. He quite possibly dealt more damage than the rest of the team. This whole thing is hilarious: A giant knight on a monstrous horse got instantly chopped in half but Rinoa summoned her friendly collie to fight the same guy like 10 times.
Because of Angelo's efforts, we soon met a random guy with swords.
We began Disc 4 here. Somehow, we had another bad fight against Adel and not even because of killing Rinoa or anything. Honestly, I don't remember what specifically went wrong.
Take 2! We had saved at the disc transition so restarting was quick. I chose to emphasize offense and Irvine dealt some excellent damage with Shot that ended the fight quickly.
We did the time compression part of the game. It's weird but I guess that's the point. I don't really know what's going on with the series of "sorceress" battles, but the melting backgrounds are cool. We won pretty easily. Irvine sealed the deal at the end with Shot, which is great because I was scared of the countdown.
Now we're in the future, I think. I forgot about these portals. I know there's something you do here to get back to the Ragnarok, and that's fun, but I'm just going to skip that. I think I have what I need.
I made my parties: the high-levelled team of Squall the knight, Zell the thief, and Quistis the white mage (each choice intended to augment their Limit Breaks), and the low-levelled team of Irvine the knight, Rinoa the white mage, and Selphie the black mage.
I'm not sure whether segregating by strength is the best thing to do here or not. Oh well.
I arranged Rinoa's spell list so that if I were to use Angel Wing, she'd have really high odds of selecting Holy.
I also swapped Squall and Irvine into the middle position in their teams since that's the nature of how Cover works in this game.
I don't remember Ultimecia's Castle very well at all, but I did remember that Sphinxaur is in the first room and that it was balanced to be beaten by attacking with basically anything.
I unlocked Item, since that's one of few things that are fairly universal for me. Then things got... worse.
My vague memories of this area is that it's utterly swamped with bosses and you wander through and the first few bosses are designed to be beaten with few abilities. But it took me ages to find a second boss - or that's how it felt? - and when I did it was Tri-Point who totally wrecked my strong team!
As you may be able to tell I ran into Tri-Point multiple times just trying to leave! And I hadn't unlocked the ability to revive or save yet. Quistis was running... a lot.
Um, okay. As soon as I could, I switched to Team Weak. They did great, actually, and they even fought quite a few randoms.
They walked and walked and walked without really finding anything, when we came upon... Tiamat.
We didn't fight her though! Not yet. I was thinking to myself, "Isn't Tiamat literally right before the final boss?", as that's how I remembered it. We might've been able to win but I figured I must've somehow walked around 5 or more bosses. So I wandered backward from there.
Choosing a different route, the very next guy I found was Red Giant.
So we fought Red Giant for, um, 20 minutes or so. Maybe more. He was blinded by Selphie, so he wasn't really hurting us. Selphie and Rinoa could attack for ~10 damage each, and Irvine was doing ~120 or so. I only had Attack and Item available though, not even Limit Breaks. Since I had tons of Ultima Stones, I even tried getting my mages to throw some Ultima spells out.
Even Ultima used by a full-powered Black Mage only did ~150 damage. What an impasse. Boy was I relieved when a sword suddenly fell from above..!
Gilgamesh will help us! He grabbed his trusty... Zantetsuken... and missed.
Y'know what? Forget this crap. We're going to start over, look more thoroughly for the early bosses, and unlock better abilities earlier so we stop getting blocked like this. We'll do this castle end-to-end next time.
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