Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part III
Oct. 19th, 2025 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingI played chapter 3 of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles under wpot's OR4M rules between October 12th and October 19th.
At the end of the previous entry, I said that Neil the Minotaur and Musa the Coeurl might not be on my team for long. Wandering around for some errands indeed got me a reasonably-levelled Sekhret, Thamyris, and so Thamyris joined up. For the moment, there were no other big shifts in my team's composition despite having most of the tier 3 monsters now available.
Chapter 3 starts out with the battle where Orran joins you. If you're lucky, he casts Galaxy Stop or whatever it's called now and you have an easy time. That is... precisely what happened. Ramza started to lower Thamyris' faith and otherwise the battle was a piece of cake.
Next, we did the battle leaving Lesalia where Alma joins us. If I recall correctly, I took a second attempt at this one. It was about a week ago so I don't actually recall perfectly; it may have been because an important monster perma-died or something. I decided to bring a Squidraken for some reason and I don't know if it even got to land a hit.
Thamyris squished Zalmour.
The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game has delightful notifications when the shops get upgraded. I took a walk down to Goug to get Ramza an upgraded gun.
Next up was the multi-stage battle at Orbonne. Again, these segments of the game have a pretty neat little map screen which I think looks fantastic.
The first battle, in Vaults - Second Level, was actually kind of hard on my first attempt. My monsters are mostly several levels below the enemies in story battles, given the level 20 cap at the end of chapter 2, and Musa has had some trouble keeping up. Blaster is still very useful when I can set it up! But its utility in these fights made it more apparent that I would benefit from recruiting a Vampire Cat.
On the attempt where we won it was pretty decisive.
The next battle was against Isilud. This also wasn't done on my first attempt. I situated the team pretty badly in formation the first time; clearly it was important to get my stronger, less mobile units up on the walls and closer to Isilud. Instead, I had one of them move toward the summoner, and that generally didn't go well.
On the winning attempt, I treated it much more like the assassination-style battle it is. Ramza shot Isilud and then the monsters got him down to critical. You can see I brought a Steel Hawk - and it was fairly useful, actually, although it was down at the end of the fight.
Next up was exiting the vaults, where we encountered Wiegraf. It's funny, because in perusing the board for this game on GameFAQs, I saw Sharebear420 having trouble with this fight and nobody else seemed to sympathize. It was rough! Now, admittedly, I am operating under a lot of constraints that Sharebear and the other posters don't have. I found that, regardless of formation, Wiegraf would move forward before I could act and use Hallowed Bolt, killing at least one monster and significantly weakening others. This screenshot, for example, was from before my first action:
You can see there are some problems there. Since he can 100% OHKO Ramza before Ramza's movement, I had to set the formation in such a way that he couldn't resist hitting someone else. I would accept him killing a Chocobo and/or Musa the Coeurl, and then hope that Ramza (whose Pisces sign made his gun quite effective against Wiegraf) and the bulkier monsters could pull it out.
What was really frustrating was one occasion where it was barely coming together... and my remaining Malboro had a shot on Wiegraf's back... but couldn't actually attack because a Malboro's Tentacles attack only has a vertical tolerance of 1. It can't attack up stairs!
Eventually though, it came together. The team was Boco the Chocobo (dead instantly), Musa the Coeurl (dead instantly), Ramza (dead on turn 2), Thamyris the Sekhret, and Typhon the Blue Dragon. It ended up with Typhon as the only unit remaining, just above half health but without enough to withstand another attack from Wiegraf, getting one attempt at an Ice Breath from the front. It had a 75% chance to end the fight, and a 25% chance to be another defeat. This one came out on my side.
What's kind of funny in all this is how amazingly irrelevant Wiegraf's several mages and archers were. They basically didn't matter at all. The other thing that sort of startled me a bit is, at some point after, I checked the tips for this fight from wpot's O4RM guide and it practically just says, "Just beat him.", as if this were super easy! It was not.
The next part of my quest would eventually take me to the challenging fights at the end of the chapter, and I knew I'd need some preparation. My monsters were breeding as I walked, and this was sort of an okay way to get higher-levelled units in general. (The generic humans I had been keeping, one of whom was level 4, worked against this effort, but it wasn't too bad.) Despite all the breeding, I still wasn't getting a Mindflayer or a Vampire Cat... but Balias Swale quickly yielded a Mindflayer and a Gobbledygook, which is pretty great.
I figured a Gobbledygook could eventually be pretty important against a boss using its Beastmaster ability, although I also had a revenant now.
I had trouble locating a Vampire Cat regardless, and Musa wasn't having babies. I looked at a couple of guides but finding exhaustive lists of where to find monsters with which chapter it became available was... inconsistent. I ended up just doing Grogh Heights. Kapys the Mindflayer was an enormous asset in this fight, and my Malboro's Bad Breath was amazingly useful at one point as well.
I really wanted that Vampire Cat, so after consulting yet another guide - this one by QuMarsh - I went back to Balias Swale. This got really annoying. I got into a really stupid rhythm of starting and resetting battles again and again. Despite reloading being a lot easier than it was in the PS1 era, it's kind of silly that you can't exit a battle from the formation screen.
It probably took 20+ instances of this nonsense, but eventually we met and befriended Erato the Vampire Cat.
I should say: with all of the breeding and recruiting I've had a lot of monsters. When I get a lot of extras of a species, I eliminate the lowest-levelled ones and in some cases the ones with the lowest brave. I like renaming monsters sometimes to make their names meaningful or silly or just generally more relatable than the default nonsense syllables. One of my kids has walked in and asked to see my team and when he learned monsters could be renamed, he renamed several of my monsters for me.
If you see monsters being added/removed or possibly just under different names, this is why.
For the most part, I haven't been renaming the core team so I can refer to them with some continuity.
Yardrow Fort city took a few tries, mostly based on how stupid Rapha decided to be. I will say, in the winning attempt (my third, I believe) she also got really lucky with a Heaven Thunder one-shotting one of the ninjas.
Thamyris was too slow to be particularly effective in this fight, but those idle turns meant using a lot of Beef Up. Consequently, when Thamyris went to land the final blow it was for 264 of this summoner's 7 HP. This somehow made Thamyris the greatest contributor.
The Yuguewood was actually simple, and was a first try with no issues.
Next up was the three-part battle at Riovanes Castle, where the second and third part are among the most frustrating battles in the game. It surprised me that the first wasn't great either, in part because my monsters kept getting poached!
This is something I might never have observed in prior playthroughs. Even on my winning attempt, my Chocobo got poached, but it was Dadameia instead of Boco so I kept on trucking. I was very glad to have gone back to get a Vampire Cat, as Erato was able to petrify one archer and keep another stop-locked.
Eventually we won. It's funny the way these battles can swing, because often - but not always - it feels like I lose and it's not even close or I win and it's not even close.
Unsurprisingly, Wiegraf was a big jerk. This battle generally requires a specialized setup, and with my forced orator job and my level constraints I expected it to be bad. Here was my initial setup for Ramza.
This was my initial formation. Yes, this Gobbledygook was named by my son. I am very proud.
This would turn out to not be ideal for several reasons. For one minor thing, I should've put Thamyris the Sekhret closer to the action. For another, I forgot to replace Ramza's Item command with Mettle. Despite this, I beat Wiegraf and moved into the Belias phase on my first attempt!
This level of success did not continue.
On my next attempt, I remembered Mettle and fixed up the formation a bit. Ramza even dodged Wiegraf's first Aurablast! I pumped his speed up to 22 or so with Tailwind and shot down a demon or two. The bad part of this was I was pushed up to level 30.
The even worse part was that I didn't win anyway because all of my monsters were dead/petrified before Ramza could win regardless.
On the winning attempt, I buffed Ramza's speed but to a greater extent and then - using my brain here - I targeted Belias instead of the goons. Sure, the team took a lot of damage, but this was a damage race. With help from Talaos the Revenant, we won that race!
Of course, chapter 3 isn't quite over yet. We've still got the stupid rooftop battle.
Now, I need you to know that I really like this game, but this part was completely idiotic game design. I can't imagine any intelligent player ever who didn't eclipse level 50 who ever beat this battle first try. It's such a fickle battle, and you can't prepare Rapha for it if you wanted to. I truly wonder how this was tested and considered okay by the original developers. It's awful.
I can't imagine with this pre-amble that you would think this was going to go well, right?
Well, it didn't go well.
On a couple of early attempts, Rapha walked down the castle roof, and I thought everything was going to be cool. Unfortunately, Celia joined her there and tore her apart.
This all happened before Ramza could even act. The only control I had over this was boosting his speed by 1 additional point with Hermes Shoes, so I did that.
Now I could do things, but it seemed like most of the actions Ramza took made Rapha even more suicidal. Over maybe ten attempts, she was two-shot in so many spectacular ways. I tried controlling the battle using Ramza's orator abilities, but Lettie and Elmdore can't be put to sleep anyway.
Somehow, eventually, Lettie decided to throw (literally or figuratively lol) instead of attacking directly and this gave Erato the Vampire Cat a single shot at Celia. I chose for Erato to use Cat Scratch and, with it rolling slightly on the high side, it was enough to put Celia into critical status and end the fight.
Elmdore's characterization in this part of the game is an awful lot better than earlier versions, by the way. It really makes the point that he's not just a monster, and that in fact he's thankful to Ramza for what happened in chapter 1. I guess he's still monstrous, but reluctantly, and that's sort of interesting.
With that, we're done chapter 3! Those last few fights sure were stupid.
With chapter 4 incoming we have access to a lot of new and interesting monsters now! I'll be starting to recruit some of those soon. In fact, I already started chapter 4 but let's end this entry here.
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At the end of the previous entry, I said that Neil the Minotaur and Musa the Coeurl might not be on my team for long. Wandering around for some errands indeed got me a reasonably-levelled Sekhret, Thamyris, and so Thamyris joined up. For the moment, there were no other big shifts in my team's composition despite having most of the tier 3 monsters now available.
Chapter 3 starts out with the battle where Orran joins you. If you're lucky, he casts Galaxy Stop or whatever it's called now and you have an easy time. That is... precisely what happened. Ramza started to lower Thamyris' faith and otherwise the battle was a piece of cake.
Next, we did the battle leaving Lesalia where Alma joins us. If I recall correctly, I took a second attempt at this one. It was about a week ago so I don't actually recall perfectly; it may have been because an important monster perma-died or something. I decided to bring a Squidraken for some reason and I don't know if it even got to land a hit.
Thamyris squished Zalmour.
The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game has delightful notifications when the shops get upgraded. I took a walk down to Goug to get Ramza an upgraded gun.
Next up was the multi-stage battle at Orbonne. Again, these segments of the game have a pretty neat little map screen which I think looks fantastic.
The first battle, in Vaults - Second Level, was actually kind of hard on my first attempt. My monsters are mostly several levels below the enemies in story battles, given the level 20 cap at the end of chapter 2, and Musa has had some trouble keeping up. Blaster is still very useful when I can set it up! But its utility in these fights made it more apparent that I would benefit from recruiting a Vampire Cat.
On the attempt where we won it was pretty decisive.
The next battle was against Isilud. This also wasn't done on my first attempt. I situated the team pretty badly in formation the first time; clearly it was important to get my stronger, less mobile units up on the walls and closer to Isilud. Instead, I had one of them move toward the summoner, and that generally didn't go well.
On the winning attempt, I treated it much more like the assassination-style battle it is. Ramza shot Isilud and then the monsters got him down to critical. You can see I brought a Steel Hawk - and it was fairly useful, actually, although it was down at the end of the fight.
Next up was exiting the vaults, where we encountered Wiegraf. It's funny, because in perusing the board for this game on GameFAQs, I saw Sharebear420 having trouble with this fight and nobody else seemed to sympathize. It was rough! Now, admittedly, I am operating under a lot of constraints that Sharebear and the other posters don't have. I found that, regardless of formation, Wiegraf would move forward before I could act and use Hallowed Bolt, killing at least one monster and significantly weakening others. This screenshot, for example, was from before my first action:
You can see there are some problems there. Since he can 100% OHKO Ramza before Ramza's movement, I had to set the formation in such a way that he couldn't resist hitting someone else. I would accept him killing a Chocobo and/or Musa the Coeurl, and then hope that Ramza (whose Pisces sign made his gun quite effective against Wiegraf) and the bulkier monsters could pull it out.
What was really frustrating was one occasion where it was barely coming together... and my remaining Malboro had a shot on Wiegraf's back... but couldn't actually attack because a Malboro's Tentacles attack only has a vertical tolerance of 1. It can't attack up stairs!
Eventually though, it came together. The team was Boco the Chocobo (dead instantly), Musa the Coeurl (dead instantly), Ramza (dead on turn 2), Thamyris the Sekhret, and Typhon the Blue Dragon. It ended up with Typhon as the only unit remaining, just above half health but without enough to withstand another attack from Wiegraf, getting one attempt at an Ice Breath from the front. It had a 75% chance to end the fight, and a 25% chance to be another defeat. This one came out on my side.
What's kind of funny in all this is how amazingly irrelevant Wiegraf's several mages and archers were. They basically didn't matter at all. The other thing that sort of startled me a bit is, at some point after, I checked the tips for this fight from wpot's O4RM guide and it practically just says, "Just beat him.", as if this were super easy! It was not.
The next part of my quest would eventually take me to the challenging fights at the end of the chapter, and I knew I'd need some preparation. My monsters were breeding as I walked, and this was sort of an okay way to get higher-levelled units in general. (The generic humans I had been keeping, one of whom was level 4, worked against this effort, but it wasn't too bad.) Despite all the breeding, I still wasn't getting a Mindflayer or a Vampire Cat... but Balias Swale quickly yielded a Mindflayer and a Gobbledygook, which is pretty great.
I figured a Gobbledygook could eventually be pretty important against a boss using its Beastmaster ability, although I also had a revenant now.
I had trouble locating a Vampire Cat regardless, and Musa wasn't having babies. I looked at a couple of guides but finding exhaustive lists of where to find monsters with which chapter it became available was... inconsistent. I ended up just doing Grogh Heights. Kapys the Mindflayer was an enormous asset in this fight, and my Malboro's Bad Breath was amazingly useful at one point as well.
I really wanted that Vampire Cat, so after consulting yet another guide - this one by QuMarsh - I went back to Balias Swale. This got really annoying. I got into a really stupid rhythm of starting and resetting battles again and again. Despite reloading being a lot easier than it was in the PS1 era, it's kind of silly that you can't exit a battle from the formation screen.
It probably took 20+ instances of this nonsense, but eventually we met and befriended Erato the Vampire Cat.
I should say: with all of the breeding and recruiting I've had a lot of monsters. When I get a lot of extras of a species, I eliminate the lowest-levelled ones and in some cases the ones with the lowest brave. I like renaming monsters sometimes to make their names meaningful or silly or just generally more relatable than the default nonsense syllables. One of my kids has walked in and asked to see my team and when he learned monsters could be renamed, he renamed several of my monsters for me.
If you see monsters being added/removed or possibly just under different names, this is why.
For the most part, I haven't been renaming the core team so I can refer to them with some continuity.
Yardrow Fort city took a few tries, mostly based on how stupid Rapha decided to be. I will say, in the winning attempt (my third, I believe) she also got really lucky with a Heaven Thunder one-shotting one of the ninjas.
Thamyris was too slow to be particularly effective in this fight, but those idle turns meant using a lot of Beef Up. Consequently, when Thamyris went to land the final blow it was for 264 of this summoner's 7 HP. This somehow made Thamyris the greatest contributor.
The Yuguewood was actually simple, and was a first try with no issues.
Next up was the three-part battle at Riovanes Castle, where the second and third part are among the most frustrating battles in the game. It surprised me that the first wasn't great either, in part because my monsters kept getting poached!
This is something I might never have observed in prior playthroughs. Even on my winning attempt, my Chocobo got poached, but it was Dadameia instead of Boco so I kept on trucking. I was very glad to have gone back to get a Vampire Cat, as Erato was able to petrify one archer and keep another stop-locked.
Eventually we won. It's funny the way these battles can swing, because often - but not always - it feels like I lose and it's not even close or I win and it's not even close.
Unsurprisingly, Wiegraf was a big jerk. This battle generally requires a specialized setup, and with my forced orator job and my level constraints I expected it to be bad. Here was my initial setup for Ramza.
This was my initial formation. Yes, this Gobbledygook was named by my son. I am very proud.
This would turn out to not be ideal for several reasons. For one minor thing, I should've put Thamyris the Sekhret closer to the action. For another, I forgot to replace Ramza's Item command with Mettle. Despite this, I beat Wiegraf and moved into the Belias phase on my first attempt!
This level of success did not continue.
On my next attempt, I remembered Mettle and fixed up the formation a bit. Ramza even dodged Wiegraf's first Aurablast! I pumped his speed up to 22 or so with Tailwind and shot down a demon or two. The bad part of this was I was pushed up to level 30.
The even worse part was that I didn't win anyway because all of my monsters were dead/petrified before Ramza could win regardless.
On the winning attempt, I buffed Ramza's speed but to a greater extent and then - using my brain here - I targeted Belias instead of the goons. Sure, the team took a lot of damage, but this was a damage race. With help from Talaos the Revenant, we won that race!
Of course, chapter 3 isn't quite over yet. We've still got the stupid rooftop battle.
Now, I need you to know that I really like this game, but this part was completely idiotic game design. I can't imagine any intelligent player ever who didn't eclipse level 50 who ever beat this battle first try. It's such a fickle battle, and you can't prepare Rapha for it if you wanted to. I truly wonder how this was tested and considered okay by the original developers. It's awful.
I can't imagine with this pre-amble that you would think this was going to go well, right?
Well, it didn't go well.
On a couple of early attempts, Rapha walked down the castle roof, and I thought everything was going to be cool. Unfortunately, Celia joined her there and tore her apart.
This all happened before Ramza could even act. The only control I had over this was boosting his speed by 1 additional point with Hermes Shoes, so I did that.
Now I could do things, but it seemed like most of the actions Ramza took made Rapha even more suicidal. Over maybe ten attempts, she was two-shot in so many spectacular ways. I tried controlling the battle using Ramza's orator abilities, but Lettie and Elmdore can't be put to sleep anyway.
Somehow, eventually, Lettie decided to throw (literally or figuratively lol) instead of attacking directly and this gave Erato the Vampire Cat a single shot at Celia. I chose for Erato to use Cat Scratch and, with it rolling slightly on the high side, it was enough to put Celia into critical status and end the fight.
Elmdore's characterization in this part of the game is an awful lot better than earlier versions, by the way. It really makes the point that he's not just a monster, and that in fact he's thankful to Ramza for what happened in chapter 1. I guess he's still monstrous, but reluctantly, and that's sort of interesting.
With that, we're done chapter 3! Those last few fights sure were stupid.
With chapter 4 incoming we have access to a lot of new and interesting monsters now! I'll be starting to recruit some of those soon. In fact, I already started chapter 4 but let's end this entry here.
<< First | < Previous | Index | Next >
