Final Fantasy Monster Party Part II
Nov. 8th, 2025 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingI played my second session of "Final Fantasy with a party of monsters" on November 7th. Friday nights work well for me right now, I guess!
Although I had recently added WIZARD to the team, I had access to TROLL from way earlier and I thought I should consider that. TROLL is a little bit better than WIZARD for most purposes.
One thing that isn't very fun right now is that ASTOS and VAMPIRE, as bosses, have incredibly low luck stats. They are essentially completely unable to run away from battles. This sort of sucks when I fight large groups of undead that also resist FrWOLF's Frost attack; they take ages to defeat and sometimes carry some risk.
Getting the Rod from Sarda was no issue. There aren't a lot of interesting enemies in the Earth Cave or that area, but I replaced TROLL with an EARTH because of the high single-hit damage. I was also happy to eventually find WzOGREs. I fought SPHINXes, too.
Despite this, I didn't replace the team. Unfortunately, FrWOLF got killed at some point. His 0 absorb rating is really working against him. I gave some serious thought to spot-replacing FrWOLF with the WzOGRE, but that is irrelevant since I don't have any means to revive a monster in the middle of a dungeon anyway. And I never will!
I decided to push through anyway. On to LICH!
My plan was to go through ASTOS' spell list, even though RUB and SLO2 were likely to be pretty useless. I wanted to be able to FAST one of my good attackers - namely VAMPIRE - and then throw out FIR2. I may have overthought this as we won rather easily.
I went and got the CANOE. I also had to restock my heal potions, as we have been going through an awful lot of those lately. Although it was nice to have some choices, I thought the VOLCANO would have the easiest enemies and I knew I'd benefit from a Red D. I replaced the fun-to-use defensive liability that is FrWOLF with WzOGRE.
I didn't have to fight very much thanks to strategic lava walking. I met an R.HYDRA pretty early and used that for a bit.
The R.HYDRA's Cremate attack isn't particularly good. We also got CEREBUS but it's even more underwhelming.
Eventually, we found our way to the bottom floor where we had guaranteed options to fight AGAMA, Red D and KARY. AGAMA was first. I was pretty impressed with AGAMA's stats and actually switched it in for the Red D.
Red D had been a goal for a while - not just because of its general strength, but because Blaze is a particularly strong damaging enemy skill. I quickly put Red D on the team, opting to kick WzOGRE out. Thus, it was ASTOS, Red D, AGAMA and VAMPIRE who faced KARY.
I knew that KARY is weak to status element, so while I had ASTOS start his spell cycle with RUB and didn't expect it to work (which it didn't), I thought VAMPIRE's Dazzle might work. And it did. With that, the fight sort of took care of itself.
It seems we won without taking any damage.
Having this team was great as we encountered large groups of enemies, especially undead.
This built my confidence in advance of heading to the Ice Cave. Sometimes these strong multi-target spells were still the best option even against enemies who resist it, which I guess I also did from time to time when FrWOLF was on the team.
It's funny having these fire monsters on my team in the Ice Cave. It feels like it should be dangerous, but I think the only enemies here that use ice attacks are the Frost D and FrWOLF. The team was mostly able to mow down the encounters here, especially the undead groups. I was worried about things like SORCERERs' deathtouches but none happened to affect me. SORCERERs have reasonable defenses, actually, plus Trance, so I added one to my team.
The Frost D I met wasn't too scary. I checked the stats and Frost D was actually sort of unimpressive compared to the current team, so I didn't swap it in.
MAGEs can be a source of worry, and indeed their elemental attacks are nasty! They have pretty good defenses against physical attacks but they don't handle magic attacks particularly well, so we were able to nearly wipe them with Blaze. I don't know if it was luck or the high, monstertastic magic defense but RUB didn't affect us.
It seemed appropriate for a MAGE to replace ASTOS. Although ASTOS' FAST spell is nice, it takes a few turns to get to, and MAGEs have LIT3 on their second turn! Their defenses are comparable too.
Red D, MAGE, AGAMA and SORCERER vs. EYE was pretty quick and easy.
Within a fairly short span of time, my team had changed a lot. I now had Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER. This group is pretty amazing. It felt borderline cheap being able to throw out XXXX in the first turn of any fight. LIT3 was also absolutely worth the one-turn wait.
I didn't take more screenshots as I played, but this part of the game felt funny. Normally, getting the airship is very exciting, because you can access high-level magic and Gaia's excellent equipment. For me, strangely, it doesn't do that much! I considered going to Castle of Ordeals, but the only monsters there that I'm likely to actually use are SORCERER and MudGOL, one of which I have and one of which is also in the Waterfall.
So... I just went to Waterfall! I got the Cube. That was fine; it would've been nice to run into a Gas D, but that didn't work out. Instead, I met a whole herd of NITEMAREs. NITEMAREs are normally pretty unremarkable enemies but it actually tended to take my team a good few turns to defeat them.
Next I'll most likely do the entire Sea Shrine. I wonder if I ought to change the team? Red D may not be particularly effective in there.
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Although I had recently added WIZARD to the team, I had access to TROLL from way earlier and I thought I should consider that. TROLL is a little bit better than WIZARD for most purposes.
One thing that isn't very fun right now is that ASTOS and VAMPIRE, as bosses, have incredibly low luck stats. They are essentially completely unable to run away from battles. This sort of sucks when I fight large groups of undead that also resist FrWOLF's Frost attack; they take ages to defeat and sometimes carry some risk.
Getting the Rod from Sarda was no issue. There aren't a lot of interesting enemies in the Earth Cave or that area, but I replaced TROLL with an EARTH because of the high single-hit damage. I was also happy to eventually find WzOGREs. I fought SPHINXes, too.
Despite this, I didn't replace the team. Unfortunately, FrWOLF got killed at some point. His 0 absorb rating is really working against him. I gave some serious thought to spot-replacing FrWOLF with the WzOGRE, but that is irrelevant since I don't have any means to revive a monster in the middle of a dungeon anyway. And I never will!
I decided to push through anyway. On to LICH!
My plan was to go through ASTOS' spell list, even though RUB and SLO2 were likely to be pretty useless. I wanted to be able to FAST one of my good attackers - namely VAMPIRE - and then throw out FIR2. I may have overthought this as we won rather easily.
I went and got the CANOE. I also had to restock my heal potions, as we have been going through an awful lot of those lately. Although it was nice to have some choices, I thought the VOLCANO would have the easiest enemies and I knew I'd benefit from a Red D. I replaced the fun-to-use defensive liability that is FrWOLF with WzOGRE.
I didn't have to fight very much thanks to strategic lava walking. I met an R.HYDRA pretty early and used that for a bit.
The R.HYDRA's Cremate attack isn't particularly good. We also got CEREBUS but it's even more underwhelming.
Eventually, we found our way to the bottom floor where we had guaranteed options to fight AGAMA, Red D and KARY. AGAMA was first. I was pretty impressed with AGAMA's stats and actually switched it in for the Red D.
Red D had been a goal for a while - not just because of its general strength, but because Blaze is a particularly strong damaging enemy skill. I quickly put Red D on the team, opting to kick WzOGRE out. Thus, it was ASTOS, Red D, AGAMA and VAMPIRE who faced KARY.
I knew that KARY is weak to status element, so while I had ASTOS start his spell cycle with RUB and didn't expect it to work (which it didn't), I thought VAMPIRE's Dazzle might work. And it did. With that, the fight sort of took care of itself.
It seems we won without taking any damage.
Having this team was great as we encountered large groups of enemies, especially undead.
This built my confidence in advance of heading to the Ice Cave. Sometimes these strong multi-target spells were still the best option even against enemies who resist it, which I guess I also did from time to time when FrWOLF was on the team.
It's funny having these fire monsters on my team in the Ice Cave. It feels like it should be dangerous, but I think the only enemies here that use ice attacks are the Frost D and FrWOLF. The team was mostly able to mow down the encounters here, especially the undead groups. I was worried about things like SORCERERs' deathtouches but none happened to affect me. SORCERERs have reasonable defenses, actually, plus Trance, so I added one to my team.
The Frost D I met wasn't too scary. I checked the stats and Frost D was actually sort of unimpressive compared to the current team, so I didn't swap it in.
MAGEs can be a source of worry, and indeed their elemental attacks are nasty! They have pretty good defenses against physical attacks but they don't handle magic attacks particularly well, so we were able to nearly wipe them with Blaze. I don't know if it was luck or the high, monstertastic magic defense but RUB didn't affect us.
It seemed appropriate for a MAGE to replace ASTOS. Although ASTOS' FAST spell is nice, it takes a few turns to get to, and MAGEs have LIT3 on their second turn! Their defenses are comparable too.
Red D, MAGE, AGAMA and SORCERER vs. EYE was pretty quick and easy.
Within a fairly short span of time, my team had changed a lot. I now had Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER. This group is pretty amazing. It felt borderline cheap being able to throw out XXXX in the first turn of any fight. LIT3 was also absolutely worth the one-turn wait.
I didn't take more screenshots as I played, but this part of the game felt funny. Normally, getting the airship is very exciting, because you can access high-level magic and Gaia's excellent equipment. For me, strangely, it doesn't do that much! I considered going to Castle of Ordeals, but the only monsters there that I'm likely to actually use are SORCERER and MudGOL, one of which I have and one of which is also in the Waterfall.
So... I just went to Waterfall! I got the Cube. That was fine; it would've been nice to run into a Gas D, but that didn't work out. Instead, I met a whole herd of NITEMAREs. NITEMAREs are normally pretty unremarkable enemies but it actually tended to take my team a good few turns to defeat them.
Next I'll most likely do the entire Sea Shrine. I wonder if I ought to change the team? Red D may not be particularly effective in there.
< Previous | Index | Next >
