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freshfeelingI continued my playthrough of Final Fantasy III using Four Job Fiesta rules on October 18th. Again, my jobs for this run are Warrior, Onion Knight, Viking and Magus, and we don't have Magus unlocked yet.
We are starting from Amur where we needed to get Levigrass Shoes in order to confront Goldor and get our ship back. With three of our jobs available, we can create different arrangements of the party as long as those three jobs are present, and for now it makes sense - for a few reasons - to have two vikings. I started with some status pictures.
One of the reasons to have multiple vikings right now is that the only statistic that really carries through on your characters as they switch jobs is their HP total, and HP gains at level-up are based partly on a character's current Stamina statistic. I don't recall exactly how it works on the NES version and I don't know how it works on this Pixel Remaster version at all, but on the DS/3D remake version the effect was fairly profound and you'd need to use high-stamina jobs like Viking and Black Belt to potentially reach 9999 HP at max level.
Well, Archibald and Captain are current sporting 43 Stamina... a lot more than Borlon's adequate 19 and Drile's abysmal 7. If Drile keeps levelling as an onion knight, eventually his HP values are going to be way lower. I am not sure how dramatic an effect this might have but since Drile isn't exactly contributing a whole lot I figured maybe I'd just keep him dead.
We got enough money for the Viking Mail since we probably need some levels anyway, and then headed into the sewers. This was an easy area with no boss, although there was a fairly amusing culmination in a cutscene.
Next we went to Goldor's Manor. The enemies here could do some legitimate damage to Borlon as a warrior, and much less to the Vikings... although some of them cast Thunder spells and those still hurt. I experimented a bit with the vikings' Draw Attacks command here, which I think might be useful later. Borlon was mostly able to hold his own healing by using his Blood Sword anyway, although we had to heal outside of battle quite a few times.
Even against Goldor I kind of knew Drile wouldn't be bringing much to the table. The rest of us used our traditional violence. The gimmick in this fight is supposed to be that magic is less effective than usual but clearly that's not an issue for us.
I reclaimed the Enterprise and used it to visit all of the locations I could access right now, including the villages of Duster and Replito. They really had nothing particularly useful for me. I decided I should proceed and flew over Saronia to get shot down.
The next obstacle here is Garuda. Garuda is somewhat famous as a "puzzle boss" designed to be defeated by changing your party members into dragoons, and you get a ton of mostly-free dragoon equipment in the area to facilitate this. Well, that wasn't going to help my team at all. However, I was optimistic because of all of my early overlevelling and general success against sticky bosses like Giant Rat and Hyne that we might be fine.
We were not fine.
I really had no idea how close I was to defeating Garuda at this point, but with levels in the mid-20s my characters were all dead in two of Garuda's Lightning attacks, and his physical attacks were very sparse. I tried another time but with no way of knowing whether I was close I knew some grinding was needed.
I had forgotten that at this point in the game with your airship shot down, you're also locked inside the perimeter of Saronia, so the only place to level up is inside the Dragon Spire. My plan was to gain levels and also hope for some kind of relevant or useful spellcasting item drop, particularly so that Drile might end up with something to contribute. I also started micro-managing the team's jobs to optimize HP gains to the extent that I could, changing the characters to vikings when they were about to level up.
The process was fairly excruciating... although it did get easier as it went along. Unfortunately I only ever got one useful spellcasting item, a tornado-generating thing called a Raven's Yawn.
After roughly 40 minutes of grinding, I had the team at level 30, although I had never revived Captain who had been an onion knight the whole time so Drile could gain levels more usefully. This left Captain considerably weaker than his comrades. It didn't work out.
On some occasions, I took two attempts at Garuda. I wasn't aware of his HP value and I thought it was perfectly likely that I was close. The damage of Lightning did end up being lower here, which I'm sure was partly the development of the characters' defensive stats and partly some equipment choices (e.g. the physical defense offered by the Viking Mail wasn't as useful as the bit of magic defense offered by the Flame Mail).
After roughly 80 minutes of grinding, including rotating the role of dead onion knight, characters were level 30 or 33.
This was still bad but we were clearly surviving more effectively. I had tried throwing out our Raven's Yawn item with different characters and I found that Drile the onion knight was doing ~800 damage with it and Archibald the viking was doing ~700 damage with it. Later, I'd try using it with Borlon, who has quite a high warrior job level, and it would clear 2000 damage! We lost anway, for now.
I had my stream go out around this time, so there's a second, shorter video of the ending of this session. However, the only really fun part is my next battle with Garuda.
After roughly 120 minutes of grinding, including a bit of time with the boost on, still having not earned another Raven's Yawn, we tried again. Our levels were 37-38.
On what was very likely our last turn, we won! Clearly it was tight. Borlon using the Raven's Yawn on turn 1 was somewhat of a difference maker, but as we gained levels our attacks were stronger and more reliable and our defenses were improving, too.
Phew. It felt good to have that done. As far as I recall that's the last boss battle that truly tries to force a certain job set to defeat it... although some of my characters' jobs are certainly going to be showing their age late in the game.
I shopped in and plundered Saronia and then explored the world a little bit in my new Nautilus. I had a lot of money after the grind, so I purchased an awful lot of consumables. There are not that many new places that we can get to yet, but we entered Doga's manor. I didn't proceed into the Cave of the Circle - we will do that next time.
There are only a handful of mandatory dungeons left, really! There are several optional ones available soon, like underwater Saronia, the Underwater Cave, Lake Dohr and the whole Bahamut thing. I wonder if I should beeline Magus and come back to those dungeons. I guess it depends on whether the team is strong enough!
Irrelevant to the run, another social media policy change recently drove over a million people to join Bluesky in a short span of time. It's buzzin', so if you're on there maybe give @freshfeeling.bsky.social a follow.
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We are starting from Amur where we needed to get Levigrass Shoes in order to confront Goldor and get our ship back. With three of our jobs available, we can create different arrangements of the party as long as those three jobs are present, and for now it makes sense - for a few reasons - to have two vikings. I started with some status pictures.
One of the reasons to have multiple vikings right now is that the only statistic that really carries through on your characters as they switch jobs is their HP total, and HP gains at level-up are based partly on a character's current Stamina statistic. I don't recall exactly how it works on the NES version and I don't know how it works on this Pixel Remaster version at all, but on the DS/3D remake version the effect was fairly profound and you'd need to use high-stamina jobs like Viking and Black Belt to potentially reach 9999 HP at max level.
Well, Archibald and Captain are current sporting 43 Stamina... a lot more than Borlon's adequate 19 and Drile's abysmal 7. If Drile keeps levelling as an onion knight, eventually his HP values are going to be way lower. I am not sure how dramatic an effect this might have but since Drile isn't exactly contributing a whole lot I figured maybe I'd just keep him dead.
We got enough money for the Viking Mail since we probably need some levels anyway, and then headed into the sewers. This was an easy area with no boss, although there was a fairly amusing culmination in a cutscene.
Next we went to Goldor's Manor. The enemies here could do some legitimate damage to Borlon as a warrior, and much less to the Vikings... although some of them cast Thunder spells and those still hurt. I experimented a bit with the vikings' Draw Attacks command here, which I think might be useful later. Borlon was mostly able to hold his own healing by using his Blood Sword anyway, although we had to heal outside of battle quite a few times.
Even against Goldor I kind of knew Drile wouldn't be bringing much to the table. The rest of us used our traditional violence. The gimmick in this fight is supposed to be that magic is less effective than usual but clearly that's not an issue for us.
I reclaimed the Enterprise and used it to visit all of the locations I could access right now, including the villages of Duster and Replito. They really had nothing particularly useful for me. I decided I should proceed and flew over Saronia to get shot down.
The next obstacle here is Garuda. Garuda is somewhat famous as a "puzzle boss" designed to be defeated by changing your party members into dragoons, and you get a ton of mostly-free dragoon equipment in the area to facilitate this. Well, that wasn't going to help my team at all. However, I was optimistic because of all of my early overlevelling and general success against sticky bosses like Giant Rat and Hyne that we might be fine.
We were not fine.
I really had no idea how close I was to defeating Garuda at this point, but with levels in the mid-20s my characters were all dead in two of Garuda's Lightning attacks, and his physical attacks were very sparse. I tried another time but with no way of knowing whether I was close I knew some grinding was needed.
I had forgotten that at this point in the game with your airship shot down, you're also locked inside the perimeter of Saronia, so the only place to level up is inside the Dragon Spire. My plan was to gain levels and also hope for some kind of relevant or useful spellcasting item drop, particularly so that Drile might end up with something to contribute. I also started micro-managing the team's jobs to optimize HP gains to the extent that I could, changing the characters to vikings when they were about to level up.
The process was fairly excruciating... although it did get easier as it went along. Unfortunately I only ever got one useful spellcasting item, a tornado-generating thing called a Raven's Yawn.
After roughly 40 minutes of grinding, I had the team at level 30, although I had never revived Captain who had been an onion knight the whole time so Drile could gain levels more usefully. This left Captain considerably weaker than his comrades. It didn't work out.
On some occasions, I took two attempts at Garuda. I wasn't aware of his HP value and I thought it was perfectly likely that I was close. The damage of Lightning did end up being lower here, which I'm sure was partly the development of the characters' defensive stats and partly some equipment choices (e.g. the physical defense offered by the Viking Mail wasn't as useful as the bit of magic defense offered by the Flame Mail).
After roughly 80 minutes of grinding, including rotating the role of dead onion knight, characters were level 30 or 33.
This was still bad but we were clearly surviving more effectively. I had tried throwing out our Raven's Yawn item with different characters and I found that Drile the onion knight was doing ~800 damage with it and Archibald the viking was doing ~700 damage with it. Later, I'd try using it with Borlon, who has quite a high warrior job level, and it would clear 2000 damage! We lost anway, for now.
I had my stream go out around this time, so there's a second, shorter video of the ending of this session. However, the only really fun part is my next battle with Garuda.
After roughly 120 minutes of grinding, including a bit of time with the boost on, still having not earned another Raven's Yawn, we tried again. Our levels were 37-38.
On what was very likely our last turn, we won! Clearly it was tight. Borlon using the Raven's Yawn on turn 1 was somewhat of a difference maker, but as we gained levels our attacks were stronger and more reliable and our defenses were improving, too.
Phew. It felt good to have that done. As far as I recall that's the last boss battle that truly tries to force a certain job set to defeat it... although some of my characters' jobs are certainly going to be showing their age late in the game.
I shopped in and plundered Saronia and then explored the world a little bit in my new Nautilus. I had a lot of money after the grind, so I purchased an awful lot of consumables. There are not that many new places that we can get to yet, but we entered Doga's manor. I didn't proceed into the Cave of the Circle - we will do that next time.
There are only a handful of mandatory dungeons left, really! There are several optional ones available soon, like underwater Saronia, the Underwater Cave, Lake Dohr and the whole Bahamut thing. I wonder if I should beeline Magus and come back to those dungeons. I guess it depends on whether the team is strong enough!
Irrelevant to the run, another social media policy change recently drove over a million people to join Bluesky in a short span of time. It's buzzin', so if you're on there maybe give @freshfeeling.bsky.social a follow.
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