Final Fantasy VIII Classic Jobs Part X
Sep. 27th, 2024 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingAlthough there was no outright defeat in the early going in Ultimecia Castle as noted in the previous update, I had decided to start again anyway and just be a bit more methodical.
I continued playing on September 23rd and beat 5 of Ultimecia's last-minute boss goons, I believe, only to find that when I picked up the game to finish things on September 25th my Miyoo Mini's battery had died and totally lost the most recent save because I had never hit the home button to create the new state. Blaaagh.
Anyway, I beat those bosses! I'll just kind of discuss my encounters with them in an aggregate format since, besides the bosses, there was really very little of interest here. On both the 23rd and the 25th my teams were the same, set up as follows:
● Squall the level 100 thief, Zell the high-level knight, and Rinoa the very low-level white mage.
● Quistis the high-level black mage, Irvine the mid-level knight, and Selphie the mid-level white mage.
Sphinxaur
Not interesting. Although I'll say it took noticeably longer with Quistis/Irvine/Selphie than it did with Squall's team. Irvine even died against it!
Both times, I enabled Magic here.
Tri-Point
On the 23rd, I found Krysta pretty tough. I had a rhythm but it required a lot of Protect and healing to keep my attackers alive, and without Meltdown/Vit 0 my offense was limited. Thus, on the actual run to completion on the 25th I did Tri-Point earlier. In the previous session I had observed the powerful lightning counter, so I just outfitted the team to absorb lightning. Thus, I was careful to use the team with no thief: Quistis, Irvine and Selphie. With a setup like this it was still a little bit slow, but simple.
In the final run, I enabled Limit Break here.
Krysta
While I did beat Krysta on the 23rd, as noted above, it took ages. I optimized this a little bit on the 25th by also having Limit Breaks unlocked, and that sped things up. It is otherwise a boring fight. Gilgamesh tried to spice things up but then the nincompoop used Excalipoor.
At the end of the fight Krysta uses Ultima, and that is pretty rough, but at least one of us survived so that's fine.
On the final run, I enabled Item here.
Catoblepas
On the 23rd, I hadn't actually found Catoblepas before stopping for the day, but I did stumble upon some keys. When I had to do this again on the 25th, I claimed both keys immediately after defeating Krysta.
Catoblepas is a pretty easy one. I had outfitted both knights with Thundara+Thunder on Elem-Def-J because of Tri-Point so nothing seemed the least bit dangerous until its final attack.
I think I enabled Resurrection here.
Trauma
I found and defeated Trauma on both days. This fight is really easy compared to Tri-Point and Krysta! Maybe things are just getting easier as I enable abilities.
Its one really big attack did enable some Limit Breaks, and at one point Quistis' White Wind came in handy. Trauma has a fun defeat animation.
I enabled Draw here on my final run.
Red Giant
Finally, this bozo again. Part of the reason I had the team of Selphie the white mage, Irvine the knight, and Quistis the black mage down here is precisely because I wanted Meltdown for this fight. Demi can also trivialize it, and I did drawcast Demi against it a little bit. With this boss blinded, it is a very one-sided battle... as long as there's some means to cope with its defense. This time, there was!
I had realized that the locked "GF" ability also counted for the GF menu abilities and not just summoning, so I re-enabled that here. The only locked abilities remaining were "Command Ability" - which basically means Defend - and Save.
Gargantua
I hadn't fought this fellow on my first pass. Besides the fact that it starts as a fairly normal-looking Vysage encounter, there's nothing especially different or hard about it. I may have spent a stupid amount of time buffing early in the fight, especially since this enemy seems to cast Dispel pretty frequently.
It was a pretty standard fight. Eventually, it cast Berserk on Irvine the knight, who killed it with his very next Berserk-empowered attack.
I finally unlocked Save here.
That just leaves Tiamat, who I sort of met earlier. I approached Tiamat with Irvine's team again - we had been having a good time! - and I junctioned everyone with abundant fire resistance. It turns out Tiamat can't or won't actually do anything that can possibly harm you if you negate fire damage so, yeah, this was simple. I really could have done it earlier!
Gilgamesh thought he might help but, once again, he just did a 1-minute animation to cause 1 damage.
Anyway, we won.
Okay, so now we're at the very end of the game and feeling fairly ready for it.
But y'know what?
Why don't we go beat a superboss for a change? Using the absolute worst cheese we have.
My plan for Omega Weapon was multi-faceted. I would re-shuffle the teams so that the ones actually facing it would be Squall as a thief, Zell as a knight, and Quistis as a black mage. Zell and Squall are for physical damage, Quistis is mainly for Meltdown and support. They also happen to be my three highest-level characters.
Although it's pretty much irrelevant to fighting Omega Weapon, this does mean that the remaining characters, Irvine, Selphie, and Rinoa, are a knight, a white mage, and a white mage and this violates the rules of this playthrough. So, for this plan I'm going to junction swap Quistis and Selphie at the last minute to ensure two of the same class don't appear in battle. It's fine.
For Omega Weapon, we're going to try to dance around his moves - or at least the bad ones, since they're fairly predictable - using our 10 Holy War items. With Squall's Initiative, this will also negate Level 5 Death. Quistis is going to inflict Meltdown, and then we're going to attack. We want to invite some of the weaker attacks - especially Gravija - to get into critical status to enable Limit Breaks.
Although we probably could prepare more, by coming in with certain HP values or something, I chose not to over-prepare. 10 Holy Wars is cheesy enough, right?
This generally went well, but I knew there was potential for disaster depending on what attacks landed the moment the Holy Wars expired. Sometimes I tried to get sneaky with that gap, too, trying to apply a buff. I made sure to enable Triple on Quistis and had her triple-cast Meteor on Omega Weapon which would do ~35000 damage per turn even without Limit Breaks.
Gilgamesh showed up and... did nothing. wtf. I'm not sure Gilgamesh has done anything the least bit useful since I got him.
Zell and Squall were doing well on the offense, especially once they had been weakened enough to do some Limit Breaks.
However, as predicted, there was risk in the gap.
I decided that this was just bad luck and that I'd try again with no real changes. That gap really wasn't hard to work with; Squall's Auto-Haste meant that his Holy Wars expired faster and while that's a bit bothersome it also means that all three characters shouldn't really be vulnerable at the same time. Right?
In this second attempt - which was successful - Squall pulled out Lionheart three times.
Zell was using Duel when he could, and Quistis continued to contribute mostly with triple-cast Meteor.
And then we won! I don't think I've ever fully leaned on Holy Wars in this game but I don't feel too bad about it. This guy's prize is a lot worse than Ultima Weapon's... but really, Ultima Weapon was harder.
This allows us to get to a piano or organ but I don't know what it's for and, with my quest being what it is, it probably doesn't matter. I got paid shortly after beating Omega Weapon and it didn't even earn me a raise.
Now we're doing Ultimecia. There will be no big changes to our setups, but Initiative probably isn't very worthwhile. Neither is Vit, really, so instead for Squall the thief and Zell and Irvine as knights I've buffed their HP a little bit.
Zell and Irvine are both knights, and Selphie and Rinoa are both white mages. Right.
Wait. This is weird. How do you pick your team to face Ultimecia in this game? I didn't remember. It turns out you don't, and she picks randomly. Thus, when I started with two knights on my first attempt, before attacking in any way, I ensured one of them was dead so that they'd be wiped away, absorbed into time.
Zell was replaced quickly by Rinoa, and now... I've got two white mages. Sorry Rinoa!
Okay, okay. Now my team is Irvine the knight, Selphie the white mage, and Quistis the black mage. We can work with this!
Quistis really delivered against Omega Weapon, so let's try giving her Triple and let her use her Meteors.
We made it comfortably into the 2nd phase of the fight against... Kitty. Huh. I forgot that I had done that.
When Kitty finally used Shockwave Pulsar, unfortunately, the team emerged like this:
Quistis had queued up some more Meteors, so she beat this form but didn't manage to get a turn before the 3rd phase emerged. And the first thing Ultimecia did in phase 3? Meteor!
Well... let's try again. Y'know, if we happened to luck into Squall the thief joining in, his fast action speed could really accelerate the battle.
For attempt #2, we got Quistis the black mage, Zell the knight, and Rinoa the white mage. At least it's a valid team!
When I could, I put Rinoa into her Angel Wing state. Quistis was able to Haste her and I thought this would be great... but there was a terrible misunderstanding on my part. I didn't realize Dispel was an Angel Wing spell, and because of the way I had sorted Rinoa's spell list, truly hoping for a barrage of Holy spells, she almost entirely cast Dispel.
Furthermore, when Holy did go off... Ultimecia's first form takes no damage from it. D'oh.
Angel Wing lasted fine for a while and Zell used Duel to take us through the first form with little issue. Afterward, I found an opportunity to quickly kill and revive Rinoa so she'd stop being useless.
At the end of phase 2, Shockwave Pulsar hit again. We weathered it much more effectively, and it resulted in an opportunity for Quistis to use Mighty Guard. I happened to get the crisis level 4 result where she inflicts haste, regen, and aura. With that, we blew through the third phase.
Although the game's got narrative issues, the presentation of some of these final battles is pretty great. I love how the graphics and music work at the beginning of the final phase.
We were defensive enough here that we weren't all depending on Limit Breaks; really, only Zell's Limit Break offered substantial power. Quistis and Rinoa both had Triple status, so when support wasn't needed Quistis would triple-cast Meteor and Rinoa would triple-cast Holy (which is not absorbed by the later forms of Ultimecia).
Things sort of continued this way. With Triple enabled, Rinoa was very effective as a healer... but when Hell's Judgment reduced everyone's HP to 1, I'd eventually stop healing Zell so that he'd have more Limit Breaks and more Duel time.
Apocalypse happened once, and it was nasty, but once again Quistis survived with 10 HP and was able to Mega Phoenix the team back into shape and then we threw out a Megaelixir; no screwing around!
After another Hell's Judgment, Rinoa had a triple casting of Curaga ready to restore the team when Ultimecia succumbed to Zell's knightly kicks with the entire team at 1 HP.
With that... Quistis the black mage, Zell the knight, and Rinoa the white mage defeated Ultimecia. They barely held on! Thankfully they didn't fall into a time warp. In two attempts, Squall the thief didn't even show up once. Here's how he feels about that:
As I wrote at the end of update 5/V, this was mostly quite a fun and interesting playthrough. This is absolutely one of my least favourite Final Fantasy games; its plot and characters are generally total garbage but with little, tiny, seeds of something special that didn't get to blossom. And it's not in the way that some games have obvious, unfinished elements screaming of unfulfilled potential like Xenogears or the original release of SaGa Frontier, it's more like someone had one third of a good idea and then fully committed to it.
The individual moments and setpieces are often really great, though some of them, like the desert prison, have such incredibly bad gameplay design that you have to wonder what the goal was at times. Many "scenes" just have an overwhelming pointlessness in the larger negative, like the Lunar Cry. I kind of wish the entire game was about train heists.
The game's systems are perhaps the most abusable in the series, which is mostly a bad thing, I think, even though you can have fun with it. The self-imposed limitations of this playthrough largely corrected that. The way I assigned roles using a mixture of abilities and spells kept things feeling so much more balanced than they usually do in this game, although by endgame many enemies were either so weak it didn't matter (most randoms, most Ultimecia Castle bosses) or, uh, so hard it didn't matter (Ultima and Omega Weapon, Island Closest to Hell enemies). This was a great way to play, although the game still had plenty of dry parts.
The definitions for the jobs were good and they even matched the gameplay well. It felt good to have characters like this, and when legitimate challenges presented themselves I was generally able to think and solve them.
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I continued playing on September 23rd and beat 5 of Ultimecia's last-minute boss goons, I believe, only to find that when I picked up the game to finish things on September 25th my Miyoo Mini's battery had died and totally lost the most recent save because I had never hit the home button to create the new state. Blaaagh.
Anyway, I beat those bosses! I'll just kind of discuss my encounters with them in an aggregate format since, besides the bosses, there was really very little of interest here. On both the 23rd and the 25th my teams were the same, set up as follows:
● Squall the level 100 thief, Zell the high-level knight, and Rinoa the very low-level white mage.
● Quistis the high-level black mage, Irvine the mid-level knight, and Selphie the mid-level white mage.
Sphinxaur
Not interesting. Although I'll say it took noticeably longer with Quistis/Irvine/Selphie than it did with Squall's team. Irvine even died against it!
Both times, I enabled Magic here.
Tri-Point
On the 23rd, I found Krysta pretty tough. I had a rhythm but it required a lot of Protect and healing to keep my attackers alive, and without Meltdown/Vit 0 my offense was limited. Thus, on the actual run to completion on the 25th I did Tri-Point earlier. In the previous session I had observed the powerful lightning counter, so I just outfitted the team to absorb lightning. Thus, I was careful to use the team with no thief: Quistis, Irvine and Selphie. With a setup like this it was still a little bit slow, but simple.
In the final run, I enabled Limit Break here.
Krysta
While I did beat Krysta on the 23rd, as noted above, it took ages. I optimized this a little bit on the 25th by also having Limit Breaks unlocked, and that sped things up. It is otherwise a boring fight. Gilgamesh tried to spice things up but then the nincompoop used Excalipoor.
At the end of the fight Krysta uses Ultima, and that is pretty rough, but at least one of us survived so that's fine.
On the final run, I enabled Item here.
Catoblepas
On the 23rd, I hadn't actually found Catoblepas before stopping for the day, but I did stumble upon some keys. When I had to do this again on the 25th, I claimed both keys immediately after defeating Krysta.
Catoblepas is a pretty easy one. I had outfitted both knights with Thundara+Thunder on Elem-Def-J because of Tri-Point so nothing seemed the least bit dangerous until its final attack.
I think I enabled Resurrection here.
Trauma
I found and defeated Trauma on both days. This fight is really easy compared to Tri-Point and Krysta! Maybe things are just getting easier as I enable abilities.
Its one really big attack did enable some Limit Breaks, and at one point Quistis' White Wind came in handy. Trauma has a fun defeat animation.
I enabled Draw here on my final run.
Red Giant
Finally, this bozo again. Part of the reason I had the team of Selphie the white mage, Irvine the knight, and Quistis the black mage down here is precisely because I wanted Meltdown for this fight. Demi can also trivialize it, and I did drawcast Demi against it a little bit. With this boss blinded, it is a very one-sided battle... as long as there's some means to cope with its defense. This time, there was!
I had realized that the locked "GF" ability also counted for the GF menu abilities and not just summoning, so I re-enabled that here. The only locked abilities remaining were "Command Ability" - which basically means Defend - and Save.
Gargantua
I hadn't fought this fellow on my first pass. Besides the fact that it starts as a fairly normal-looking Vysage encounter, there's nothing especially different or hard about it. I may have spent a stupid amount of time buffing early in the fight, especially since this enemy seems to cast Dispel pretty frequently.
It was a pretty standard fight. Eventually, it cast Berserk on Irvine the knight, who killed it with his very next Berserk-empowered attack.
I finally unlocked Save here.
That just leaves Tiamat, who I sort of met earlier. I approached Tiamat with Irvine's team again - we had been having a good time! - and I junctioned everyone with abundant fire resistance. It turns out Tiamat can't or won't actually do anything that can possibly harm you if you negate fire damage so, yeah, this was simple. I really could have done it earlier!
Gilgamesh thought he might help but, once again, he just did a 1-minute animation to cause 1 damage.
Anyway, we won.
Okay, so now we're at the very end of the game and feeling fairly ready for it.
But y'know what?
Why don't we go beat a superboss for a change? Using the absolute worst cheese we have.
My plan for Omega Weapon was multi-faceted. I would re-shuffle the teams so that the ones actually facing it would be Squall as a thief, Zell as a knight, and Quistis as a black mage. Zell and Squall are for physical damage, Quistis is mainly for Meltdown and support. They also happen to be my three highest-level characters.
Although it's pretty much irrelevant to fighting Omega Weapon, this does mean that the remaining characters, Irvine, Selphie, and Rinoa, are a knight, a white mage, and a white mage and this violates the rules of this playthrough. So, for this plan I'm going to junction swap Quistis and Selphie at the last minute to ensure two of the same class don't appear in battle. It's fine.
For Omega Weapon, we're going to try to dance around his moves - or at least the bad ones, since they're fairly predictable - using our 10 Holy War items. With Squall's Initiative, this will also negate Level 5 Death. Quistis is going to inflict Meltdown, and then we're going to attack. We want to invite some of the weaker attacks - especially Gravija - to get into critical status to enable Limit Breaks.
Although we probably could prepare more, by coming in with certain HP values or something, I chose not to over-prepare. 10 Holy Wars is cheesy enough, right?
This generally went well, but I knew there was potential for disaster depending on what attacks landed the moment the Holy Wars expired. Sometimes I tried to get sneaky with that gap, too, trying to apply a buff. I made sure to enable Triple on Quistis and had her triple-cast Meteor on Omega Weapon which would do ~35000 damage per turn even without Limit Breaks.
Gilgamesh showed up and... did nothing. wtf. I'm not sure Gilgamesh has done anything the least bit useful since I got him.
Zell and Squall were doing well on the offense, especially once they had been weakened enough to do some Limit Breaks.
However, as predicted, there was risk in the gap.
I decided that this was just bad luck and that I'd try again with no real changes. That gap really wasn't hard to work with; Squall's Auto-Haste meant that his Holy Wars expired faster and while that's a bit bothersome it also means that all three characters shouldn't really be vulnerable at the same time. Right?
In this second attempt - which was successful - Squall pulled out Lionheart three times.
Zell was using Duel when he could, and Quistis continued to contribute mostly with triple-cast Meteor.
And then we won! I don't think I've ever fully leaned on Holy Wars in this game but I don't feel too bad about it. This guy's prize is a lot worse than Ultima Weapon's... but really, Ultima Weapon was harder.
This allows us to get to a piano or organ but I don't know what it's for and, with my quest being what it is, it probably doesn't matter. I got paid shortly after beating Omega Weapon and it didn't even earn me a raise.
Now we're doing Ultimecia. There will be no big changes to our setups, but Initiative probably isn't very worthwhile. Neither is Vit, really, so instead for Squall the thief and Zell and Irvine as knights I've buffed their HP a little bit.
Zell and Irvine are both knights, and Selphie and Rinoa are both white mages. Right.
Wait. This is weird. How do you pick your team to face Ultimecia in this game? I didn't remember. It turns out you don't, and she picks randomly. Thus, when I started with two knights on my first attempt, before attacking in any way, I ensured one of them was dead so that they'd be wiped away, absorbed into time.
Zell was replaced quickly by Rinoa, and now... I've got two white mages. Sorry Rinoa!
Okay, okay. Now my team is Irvine the knight, Selphie the white mage, and Quistis the black mage. We can work with this!
Quistis really delivered against Omega Weapon, so let's try giving her Triple and let her use her Meteors.
We made it comfortably into the 2nd phase of the fight against... Kitty. Huh. I forgot that I had done that.
When Kitty finally used Shockwave Pulsar, unfortunately, the team emerged like this:
Quistis had queued up some more Meteors, so she beat this form but didn't manage to get a turn before the 3rd phase emerged. And the first thing Ultimecia did in phase 3? Meteor!
Well... let's try again. Y'know, if we happened to luck into Squall the thief joining in, his fast action speed could really accelerate the battle.
For attempt #2, we got Quistis the black mage, Zell the knight, and Rinoa the white mage. At least it's a valid team!
When I could, I put Rinoa into her Angel Wing state. Quistis was able to Haste her and I thought this would be great... but there was a terrible misunderstanding on my part. I didn't realize Dispel was an Angel Wing spell, and because of the way I had sorted Rinoa's spell list, truly hoping for a barrage of Holy spells, she almost entirely cast Dispel.
Furthermore, when Holy did go off... Ultimecia's first form takes no damage from it. D'oh.
Angel Wing lasted fine for a while and Zell used Duel to take us through the first form with little issue. Afterward, I found an opportunity to quickly kill and revive Rinoa so she'd stop being useless.
At the end of phase 2, Shockwave Pulsar hit again. We weathered it much more effectively, and it resulted in an opportunity for Quistis to use Mighty Guard. I happened to get the crisis level 4 result where she inflicts haste, regen, and aura. With that, we blew through the third phase.
Although the game's got narrative issues, the presentation of some of these final battles is pretty great. I love how the graphics and music work at the beginning of the final phase.
We were defensive enough here that we weren't all depending on Limit Breaks; really, only Zell's Limit Break offered substantial power. Quistis and Rinoa both had Triple status, so when support wasn't needed Quistis would triple-cast Meteor and Rinoa would triple-cast Holy (which is not absorbed by the later forms of Ultimecia).
Things sort of continued this way. With Triple enabled, Rinoa was very effective as a healer... but when Hell's Judgment reduced everyone's HP to 1, I'd eventually stop healing Zell so that he'd have more Limit Breaks and more Duel time.
Apocalypse happened once, and it was nasty, but once again Quistis survived with 10 HP and was able to Mega Phoenix the team back into shape and then we threw out a Megaelixir; no screwing around!
After another Hell's Judgment, Rinoa had a triple casting of Curaga ready to restore the team when Ultimecia succumbed to Zell's knightly kicks with the entire team at 1 HP.
With that... Quistis the black mage, Zell the knight, and Rinoa the white mage defeated Ultimecia. They barely held on! Thankfully they didn't fall into a time warp. In two attempts, Squall the thief didn't even show up once. Here's how he feels about that:
As I wrote at the end of update 5/V, this was mostly quite a fun and interesting playthrough. This is absolutely one of my least favourite Final Fantasy games; its plot and characters are generally total garbage but with little, tiny, seeds of something special that didn't get to blossom. And it's not in the way that some games have obvious, unfinished elements screaming of unfulfilled potential like Xenogears or the original release of SaGa Frontier, it's more like someone had one third of a good idea and then fully committed to it.
The individual moments and setpieces are often really great, though some of them, like the desert prison, have such incredibly bad gameplay design that you have to wonder what the goal was at times. Many "scenes" just have an overwhelming pointlessness in the larger negative, like the Lunar Cry. I kind of wish the entire game was about train heists.
The game's systems are perhaps the most abusable in the series, which is mostly a bad thing, I think, even though you can have fun with it. The self-imposed limitations of this playthrough largely corrected that. The way I assigned roles using a mixture of abilities and spells kept things feeling so much more balanced than they usually do in this game, although by endgame many enemies were either so weak it didn't matter (most randoms, most Ultimecia Castle bosses) or, uh, so hard it didn't matter (Ultima and Omega Weapon, Island Closest to Hell enemies). This was a great way to play, although the game still had plenty of dry parts.
- The knight felt like a knight. They were the clear defensive best, except against status effects, and usually the strongest on the offense. Defend and Cover were genuinely useful.
- The thief felt like a thief. They were the only character with a speed advantage, which was massive. They were sometimes a little bit broken on the offense because of this, but seeing as their only other utility was using items that didn't seem too bad. This was further balanced by their poor defenses.
- The white mage was definitely a white mage, although with the way items and the economy work in this game they probably weren't that necessary. That said, once I had a knight and a white mage I kept them around for the majority of the game, only rotating the thief and black mage.
- The black mage was great, too. They were all-around weak but when you needed a blaster - or a Meltdown spell - they were the one to go to. And although they had relatively few junctions, they had the most spells and thus the most options for elemental defenses and such, which provided a suitable niche.
The definitions for the jobs were good and they even matched the gameplay well. It felt good to have characters like this, and when legitimate challenges presented themselves I was generally able to think and solve them.
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