Final Fantasy Monster Party Part III
Nov. 29th, 2025 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis update is about gameplay from November 21st and November 29th. On the 21st, I did a short stream that was doomed by a combination of tiredness, life happening, significant Twitch stream issues, and cat interference. It's linked but not embedded because it was short and unfun; all I actually accomplished was getting the SLAB from the Sea Shrine.
I had been using Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER, and that was pretty good, but I suspected Red D wouldn't be great in the Sea Shrine, so I changed my team to MAGE, EYE, Frost D, and Sorcerer.
Frost D is far weaker than his red brethren, but where Blaze is resisted by most enemies here, Blizzard is extra effective against the annoying, frequent WATER elementals.
We got the Slab with no real issue. We skipped most of the other treasure.
I made it out and saved in Onrac with the Slab and decided to try my luck going down to Kraken. Every so often, something mildly exciting would happen between stream crashes, like EYE successfully petrifying an enemy, or XXXX being delightfully useful again.
However, around the same time as the fifth or sixth stream crash, we got wrecked by LOBSTERs of all things and I took that as a sign that I should stop after quite a short play session.
Then today, I picked back up again, saying I wanted to build some momentum. While it wasn't all rosy, we got some things done!
First I went to Melmond to talk to Dr. Unne about my Slab. We learned a language and then I chose to sell the armor I had collected, including a Ribbon. That felt... filthy.
We wandered down to Lefein. These enemies were much simpler to fight than the Sea Shrine, or maybe it was just nice to be using Red D again.
We got our Chime. The plan, specifically, was to beeline the Blue D! Nothing was going to make the Sea Shrine - and many random encounters in general - more bearable than being able to use Thunder whenever we want.
This went fine!
Blue Ds are bulky! Their absorb rating is actually lower than several monsters I've been using, but with my minor buffs from levels and catch-em-all-ing its max HP is well over 500.
I thought... why stop there? There are some really neat monsters in the Flying Fortress.
What I said at the time, and it's true, was that I didn't see why we couldn't attempt TIAMAT now. I mean, we could go back to the Sea Shrine but it wasn't like we were going to unlock some amazing monster there that would make everything suddenly more viable, right?
Using Blue D was a lot of fun. We fought a lot of AIR. Their evasiveness was noticeable with single-hit monsters, but irrelevant when we were using so much dragon breath.
Oh yah then this.
My dragon squad could barely pierce his defense. Their breath weapons would hit but weren't doing great damage. However, there was always the chance that SORCERER could land a deathtouch. I was actually sort of surprised at how long we lasted.
In the end, believe it or not, the SORCERER deathtouch is actually what happened.
Now we were faced with a real dilemma. I would like to keep on record that I beat some of these enemies, including WarMECH - not that my monster list strictly reverts to my prior save or anything, it just seems wrong to claim ownership of a monster that I didn't beat in a finished trip. So I pondered whether I was more likely to walk back through the Sky Castle and Mirage Tower nearly out of Heal Potions with two monsters... or just beat TIAMAT.
Considering the well-known BANE/sword cheese for TIAMAT, I thought I'd take a shot at it.
Maybe I could just... petrify her? I brought EYE and a MEDUSA for the job.
It was a nice idea, I think... but it didn't work.
I tried again to rightly claim Blue D. On my next trip, I encountered some SLIME. I recalled having a great time with SCUM back in the Earth Cave and thought SLIME might give me a good shot at TIAMAT.
I don't think I was that misguided, but this didn't work either.
We got TIAMAT down by about half.
Okay, let's do something else and re-think the strategy. We know TIAMAT is weak to poison, right? Maybe it would be neat to get a Gas D. As a bonus, the Gas D fills a bit of a gap in the Sea Shrine where Red D isn't very effective. So I grinded through the encounter table in the Waterfall for a long time until we finally met the very rare Gas D.
For some reason I brought a NAGA for this. I thought its LIT2 spell might be nice in the Sea Shrine, but besides that and its high HP it doesn't have much to offer; it may have been quite a bad choice. Oh well, we're done with that now.
Unfortunately, the sprite used by Blue D and Gas D has got to be the single ugliest party-sized sprite of the bunch. As well, I was surprised that Gas D's special showed up as "POISON d" but eventually I realized that's to distinguish it from a JIMERA's Poison ability, which inflicts status instead. That ability's name isn't extracted from the game data, it's in FatRatKnight's script verbatim.
The Gas D was excellent. For most of the Sea Shrine, I used Blue D, MAGE, Gas D, and SORCERER.
Again, I pretty much skipped all of the treasures, since they're completely pointless. I got two easy-to-grab ones totaling about 600 G, so that's super great.
When it came to KRAKEN, I thought about actual strategy and realized MAGE wouldn't be doing much. I decided to pick a bulky physical person and I planned to FAST them using MudGOL, so the team was going to be ANKYLO, Blue D, Gas D, and MudGOL.
We got quite well-healed up; it was going to be perfect.
Then turn 1 happened.
Classic KRAKEN. He immediately one-shot MudGOL. Oh well, we could power through all this.
With three orbs lit and a bit of momentum (as I said we wanted at the beginning), I figured we should get back to TIAMAT. I kept the team, actually! ANKYLO makes a pretty great leader with his great offense and defense. Along the way we beat/recruited EVILMAN and SENTRY.
SENTRY is one of a handful of monsters who are better than ANKYLO in many ways statistically. Similar defenses, equal absorb, and higher attack. Both of them also have enough luck to run from battles reliably! At the suggestion of my chat, I emphasized defense against TIAMAT. I lost a monster along the way, so I brought SENTRY, ANKYLO and Gas D - whose Poison should do double damage to TIAMAT.
With that, we had all four orbs lit!
While it would be nice to wander toward endgame, I might need to consider my strategy. I don't think I need to hunt specific enemies, unless I need a T Rex or an early FIGHTER or something. At my chat's suggestion, I was starting to take a single attempt at the game's final area... but then the stream cut twice really quickly. I decided to abandon ship.
Next time we play, we'll try to get this done... and depending how that goes, we might have some other experiments to do.
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I had been using Red D, MAGE, EYE and SORCERER, and that was pretty good, but I suspected Red D wouldn't be great in the Sea Shrine, so I changed my team to MAGE, EYE, Frost D, and Sorcerer.
Frost D is far weaker than his red brethren, but where Blaze is resisted by most enemies here, Blizzard is extra effective against the annoying, frequent WATER elementals.
We got the Slab with no real issue. We skipped most of the other treasure.
I made it out and saved in Onrac with the Slab and decided to try my luck going down to Kraken. Every so often, something mildly exciting would happen between stream crashes, like EYE successfully petrifying an enemy, or XXXX being delightfully useful again.
However, around the same time as the fifth or sixth stream crash, we got wrecked by LOBSTERs of all things and I took that as a sign that I should stop after quite a short play session.
Then today, I picked back up again, saying I wanted to build some momentum. While it wasn't all rosy, we got some things done!
First I went to Melmond to talk to Dr. Unne about my Slab. We learned a language and then I chose to sell the armor I had collected, including a Ribbon. That felt... filthy.
We wandered down to Lefein. These enemies were much simpler to fight than the Sea Shrine, or maybe it was just nice to be using Red D again.
We got our Chime. The plan, specifically, was to beeline the Blue D! Nothing was going to make the Sea Shrine - and many random encounters in general - more bearable than being able to use Thunder whenever we want.
This went fine!
Blue Ds are bulky! Their absorb rating is actually lower than several monsters I've been using, but with my minor buffs from levels and catch-em-all-ing its max HP is well over 500.
I thought... why stop there? There are some really neat monsters in the Flying Fortress.
What I said at the time, and it's true, was that I didn't see why we couldn't attempt TIAMAT now. I mean, we could go back to the Sea Shrine but it wasn't like we were going to unlock some amazing monster there that would make everything suddenly more viable, right?
Using Blue D was a lot of fun. We fought a lot of AIR. Their evasiveness was noticeable with single-hit monsters, but irrelevant when we were using so much dragon breath.
Oh yah then this.
My dragon squad could barely pierce his defense. Their breath weapons would hit but weren't doing great damage. However, there was always the chance that SORCERER could land a deathtouch. I was actually sort of surprised at how long we lasted.
In the end, believe it or not, the SORCERER deathtouch is actually what happened.
Now we were faced with a real dilemma. I would like to keep on record that I beat some of these enemies, including WarMECH - not that my monster list strictly reverts to my prior save or anything, it just seems wrong to claim ownership of a monster that I didn't beat in a finished trip. So I pondered whether I was more likely to walk back through the Sky Castle and Mirage Tower nearly out of Heal Potions with two monsters... or just beat TIAMAT.
Considering the well-known BANE/sword cheese for TIAMAT, I thought I'd take a shot at it.
Maybe I could just... petrify her? I brought EYE and a MEDUSA for the job.
It was a nice idea, I think... but it didn't work.
I tried again to rightly claim Blue D. On my next trip, I encountered some SLIME. I recalled having a great time with SCUM back in the Earth Cave and thought SLIME might give me a good shot at TIAMAT.
I don't think I was that misguided, but this didn't work either.
We got TIAMAT down by about half.
Okay, let's do something else and re-think the strategy. We know TIAMAT is weak to poison, right? Maybe it would be neat to get a Gas D. As a bonus, the Gas D fills a bit of a gap in the Sea Shrine where Red D isn't very effective. So I grinded through the encounter table in the Waterfall for a long time until we finally met the very rare Gas D.
For some reason I brought a NAGA for this. I thought its LIT2 spell might be nice in the Sea Shrine, but besides that and its high HP it doesn't have much to offer; it may have been quite a bad choice. Oh well, we're done with that now.
Unfortunately, the sprite used by Blue D and Gas D has got to be the single ugliest party-sized sprite of the bunch. As well, I was surprised that Gas D's special showed up as "POISON d" but eventually I realized that's to distinguish it from a JIMERA's Poison ability, which inflicts status instead. That ability's name isn't extracted from the game data, it's in FatRatKnight's script verbatim.
The Gas D was excellent. For most of the Sea Shrine, I used Blue D, MAGE, Gas D, and SORCERER.
Again, I pretty much skipped all of the treasures, since they're completely pointless. I got two easy-to-grab ones totaling about 600 G, so that's super great.
When it came to KRAKEN, I thought about actual strategy and realized MAGE wouldn't be doing much. I decided to pick a bulky physical person and I planned to FAST them using MudGOL, so the team was going to be ANKYLO, Blue D, Gas D, and MudGOL.
We got quite well-healed up; it was going to be perfect.
Then turn 1 happened.
Classic KRAKEN. He immediately one-shot MudGOL. Oh well, we could power through all this.
With three orbs lit and a bit of momentum (as I said we wanted at the beginning), I figured we should get back to TIAMAT. I kept the team, actually! ANKYLO makes a pretty great leader with his great offense and defense. Along the way we beat/recruited EVILMAN and SENTRY.
SENTRY is one of a handful of monsters who are better than ANKYLO in many ways statistically. Similar defenses, equal absorb, and higher attack. Both of them also have enough luck to run from battles reliably! At the suggestion of my chat, I emphasized defense against TIAMAT. I lost a monster along the way, so I brought SENTRY, ANKYLO and Gas D - whose Poison should do double damage to TIAMAT.
With that, we had all four orbs lit!
While it would be nice to wander toward endgame, I might need to consider my strategy. I don't think I need to hunt specific enemies, unless I need a T Rex or an early FIGHTER or something. At my chat's suggestion, I was starting to take a single attempt at the game's final area... but then the stream cut twice really quickly. I decided to abandon ship.
Next time we play, we'll try to get this done... and depending how that goes, we might have some other experiments to do.
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