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Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part VI
Nov. 10th, 2025 09:54 pmI finished my OR4M playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics today, on November 10th. It had been a while since my previous play session partly because of the monster playthrough of FF1 I've been doing, but the breaks I took during this are nothing compared to my previous FFT variant play.
We had done a large part of chapter 4 already. Our first destination was Eagrose to face Dycedarg. We decided to fight Dycedarg instead of Dycedarg's elder brother.
You can see that I brought my assassination squad here. The Gobbledygook wasn't going to be viable as we'd never be able to get up to the top level of the map in time, but I figured Root Beer Float the Revenant and Ampelos the Behemoth King would carry value against both Dycedarg and Adrammelech.
This battle was tough and it took several attempts. For some I used a regular Behemoth instead of a King Behemoth to make use of Gigaflare, but ultimately Twister was more useful. I had some early runs with a Behemoth but they didn't work out well, especially when Adrammelech got to 100% petrifying each monster.
Dycedarg would tend to quickly throw out a Hallowed Bolt and wreck my starting crew. Sometimes I'd try to keep going even if a utility monster like my Cockatrice or Vampire Cat died, but there was an occasion where I reset the fight because Root Beer Float the Revenant turned into crystal. That usually signaled the beginning of the end.
In brief, one I refocused on emphasizing proportionate damage and exclusively targeting Dycedarg, things went better.
The battle at Mullonde Cathedral I mostly find interesting for having geomancers. They are pretty nasty on the offense, actually, and it felt like the enemies had rather high HP in general here. The GameFAQs board seems to be full of whispers that among this version's vague balance changes, there's a pretty substantial HP buff given to enemies through chapter 4. Luckily, that doesn't matter when I turn half of my opponents into statues.
I talked all boastfully but really, this wasn't easy. It was at least three attempts before I got through without Ramza crystalizing because of a geomancer's attack dealing ~200 damage. Even that prior screencap was from a losing attempt.
The interior battle is a funny one. To win, all you have to do is get any one of Loffrey, Cletienne or Folmarv into critical status. The problem is that HP buff I was talking about. Cletienne is still the weakest, but he had 673 HP. Proportionate damage is the probable solution but that also requires surviving a serious onslaught from Folmarv and Loffrey.
With some luck and two successful Drain Touches from Root Beer Float, we were able to beat what felt like a tough one on the first try.
Ramza was named greatest contributor here, which is a total farce.
In the tomb area under Mullonde, we had our fight with Zombaag. Honestly, the voice acting for this scene made it legitimately creepy and sad. I've never found these scenes particularly impactful, so... good job, remake.
I think I was completely brilliant in this fight. The key move was bringing my Mindflayer, actually, who was able to occupy the demons and also cancel some of their spellcasting. It got knocked out, of course, but it certainly bought me some time. Since elements didn't really matter, Reis came along to bring some bulk and higher-powered breath attacks - although, really, someone with Drain Touch or something like that may have made sense, too.
After this, I did some propositions/errands (which also results in a few high-levelled monsters). My wandering also triggered the Construct 8 scenes although that doesn't actually matter for my variant play. We needed to go through Goug since Loffrey had smashed my last Mythril Gun.
I also did a few battles at Balias Swale hoping to recruit a basic Hydra, but there was no such luck and I didn't want to grind or risk high levels. This did enable me to get a couple new high-levelled monsters, like a nice new Gobbledygook (named Silkbottom Mars) at level 42 and a new Mindflayer (Kleobis) at level 43.
Now we were ready enough (?) for the final sequence. In the Orbonne Vaults level 4, we had what I realized was literally the final "defeat all enemies" battle in the game, against an archer, three knights and two monks. The monks had well over 600 HP, quite a bit more than my dragons and behemoths. Our first few attempts went quite poorly (and I posted about it), but then I decided to experiment with letting the enemies come to me and that went a bit better.
Petrification and Gigaflare were the big wins for us. I made an intentional sacrifice play by letting :)( yngiht drib the Cockatrice turn into a crystal after a while, and then I was surprised that my Red Chocobo got poached by the enemy archer. I decided not to reset for this since it was the last non-boss battle in the game anyway, which I think was a good call.
Next was the battle with Loffrey. This battle went amazingly well. A few things worked in my favour here: I had Ampelos the King Behemoth and Root Beer Float the Revenant for proportionate damage, I had generally low faith all around to make the casters mostly irrelevant, and I brought my Mindflayer to further disrupt the casters. I even brought my Greater Malboro, resulting in Loffrey's goons having a wide variety of ailments through the fight.
It was very manageable. The eventual victory came down to Ramza shooting Loffrey at a great distance just once with his Mythril Gun.
Now we're into the Necrohol of Mullonde, which... surely means something.
The first battle here is against Cletienne. It was tough. This one might've taken me ten tries, although some of these attempts were short. Each time, Cletienne would start by aiming Flare at my still-mid-faith Greater Malboro, so I'd counter by using Enlighten on it to make the damage far worse. I tried to hang back to avoid the onslaught from ninjas (the other enemies weren't very scary) but I needed to work on offense. The ninjas and samurais all have over 700 HP in this version, so defeating them by direct damage is pretty pointless. Even Choco Meteor only does ~100 damage depending on compatibility, so I needed to rethink this.
One again, the answer was: assassinate! I brought Root Beer Float and Ampelos and made every effort to get them safely toward Cletienne while the rest of the team was essentially a distraction. An early, strong attempt and my eventual win both involved Root Beer Float literally teleporting all the way across the battlefield (bad odds!) and Drain Touching Cletienne on turn 1.
Beyond that, this required some luck. This included a completely bizarre string of epic dodges on Ramza's part that I managed to capture:
Even though this shows Ampelos missing Cletienne, this was the eventual winning attempt. With Ramza surviving and Root Beer Float camping next to Cletienne, we were able to get another proportionate attack off to win. Er, to almost win. A time mage had thrown Cletienne a Potion, so Ramza also needed to shoot him once at the end, just like with Loffrey.
You might notice that Ramza's HP was a little low in that last battle. That's actually because Loffrey had broken his armor - a Black Costume - and I had forgotten to replace it. Before the battle with Barich, I replaced it with a White Robe to mitigate the elemental damage from guns and tiamats. I also ditched the Featherweave Cloak since evasion wasn't going to matter much for the rest of the game.
Barich seemed like it was likely to be a tough one, but I had the power of iteration! I knew I just needed a bit of favourable positioning and some luck to recruit the terrible flying dragons and this would come together.
I also tried to be strategic without a Tiamat, but I can tell you that it didn't work out. This still probably took fewer attempts than Vaults 4 and Cletienne. I tried really hard to stay to the side that Barich starts on to bring the winged dragons over and keep my party formation tight. Root Beer Float landed a Drain Touch and then spent most of the battle knocked out.
On some attempts, I was greatly helped out by unusual luck on the Tri-Flames and Tri-Thunder.
Eventually, I ended up with some very favourable positioning where the Greater Hydra and then the Tiamat were directly across the short gap from Ramza and he was able to use Entice on them. (Conveniently, the Tiamat was exactly level 50, if that mattered.) I actually got both - but not the normal Hydra - and it was the Tiamat who eventually killed Barich with a Tri-Flame.
This takes us to the graveyard of airships! I wasn't too afraid of these battles because of my assassination team. I went all in on it, actually: the team was Ramza, Boco (for healing), Root Beer Float the Revenant, Ampelos the King Behemoth, and Silkbottom Mars the Gobbledygook. Ramza and Boco were the support, and the other three could all do some heavy lifting.
Honestly, these final three battles all went so easily and quickly that it's sort of hard to elaborate on, but it's really fun to see the big damage numbers. Every member of the team got a chance to shine, that's for sure.
The Ultima fight seemed like it could've been tough because of the Ultima Demons, but they mostly threw out bad spells and targetted Alma (who had reraise status). I also used Ramza's turn to Mimic Darlavon and put a pair of them to sleep successfully twice.
The second form of Ultima had us on the ropes a bit. It must've used Grand Cross five times, but between Ramza's Remedy and Alma's Dispelna (?) we held together. At one point a Divine Ultima was aimed at Alma and I had Ramza walk over to her and Enlighten her. It lowered her magic effectiveness for future spells, but saved her in the short term, and MP was getting low at that point anyway.
I also found Ultima's final form very fast. It was hard to keep up the heals, but we managed.
We won! This was a pretty good challenge. Someone in my GameFAQs thread about this playthrough said this seemed boring but variant play is always about novel solutions to problems and the monsters really allow for that. Though I'll admit - I probably had at least 50 failed battles through this whole thing. Though I know my decisions mattered, there were points where it felt like it was more of a test of patience in saving and reloading than it was in actual strategic skill.
I had seen wpot's threads and guide about OR4M for literal years, so it was really fun to finally do it, and it's amusing that it loosely coincides with the timing of my FF1 with monsters playthrough, too. This was also a nice way to experience the new version of FFT with a bit of a... guiding framework.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles feels like an excellent version of this game. As for its impact on OR4M, these seemingly very inflated enemy HP values definitely change the way you need to approach the end of the game. It basically becomes all about petrification and the three monster types with proportionate damage. Perhaps that does make it less interesting.
It's still a good way to play this game, I think.
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We had done a large part of chapter 4 already. Our first destination was Eagrose to face Dycedarg. We decided to fight Dycedarg instead of Dycedarg's elder brother.
You can see that I brought my assassination squad here. The Gobbledygook wasn't going to be viable as we'd never be able to get up to the top level of the map in time, but I figured Root Beer Float the Revenant and Ampelos the Behemoth King would carry value against both Dycedarg and Adrammelech.
This battle was tough and it took several attempts. For some I used a regular Behemoth instead of a King Behemoth to make use of Gigaflare, but ultimately Twister was more useful. I had some early runs with a Behemoth but they didn't work out well, especially when Adrammelech got to 100% petrifying each monster.
Dycedarg would tend to quickly throw out a Hallowed Bolt and wreck my starting crew. Sometimes I'd try to keep going even if a utility monster like my Cockatrice or Vampire Cat died, but there was an occasion where I reset the fight because Root Beer Float the Revenant turned into crystal. That usually signaled the beginning of the end.
In brief, one I refocused on emphasizing proportionate damage and exclusively targeting Dycedarg, things went better.
The battle at Mullonde Cathedral I mostly find interesting for having geomancers. They are pretty nasty on the offense, actually, and it felt like the enemies had rather high HP in general here. The GameFAQs board seems to be full of whispers that among this version's vague balance changes, there's a pretty substantial HP buff given to enemies through chapter 4. Luckily, that doesn't matter when I turn half of my opponents into statues.
I talked all boastfully but really, this wasn't easy. It was at least three attempts before I got through without Ramza crystalizing because of a geomancer's attack dealing ~200 damage. Even that prior screencap was from a losing attempt.
The interior battle is a funny one. To win, all you have to do is get any one of Loffrey, Cletienne or Folmarv into critical status. The problem is that HP buff I was talking about. Cletienne is still the weakest, but he had 673 HP. Proportionate damage is the probable solution but that also requires surviving a serious onslaught from Folmarv and Loffrey.
With some luck and two successful Drain Touches from Root Beer Float, we were able to beat what felt like a tough one on the first try.
Ramza was named greatest contributor here, which is a total farce.
In the tomb area under Mullonde, we had our fight with Zombaag. Honestly, the voice acting for this scene made it legitimately creepy and sad. I've never found these scenes particularly impactful, so... good job, remake.
I think I was completely brilliant in this fight. The key move was bringing my Mindflayer, actually, who was able to occupy the demons and also cancel some of their spellcasting. It got knocked out, of course, but it certainly bought me some time. Since elements didn't really matter, Reis came along to bring some bulk and higher-powered breath attacks - although, really, someone with Drain Touch or something like that may have made sense, too.
After this, I did some propositions/errands (which also results in a few high-levelled monsters). My wandering also triggered the Construct 8 scenes although that doesn't actually matter for my variant play. We needed to go through Goug since Loffrey had smashed my last Mythril Gun.
I also did a few battles at Balias Swale hoping to recruit a basic Hydra, but there was no such luck and I didn't want to grind or risk high levels. This did enable me to get a couple new high-levelled monsters, like a nice new Gobbledygook (named Silkbottom Mars) at level 42 and a new Mindflayer (Kleobis) at level 43.
Now we were ready enough (?) for the final sequence. In the Orbonne Vaults level 4, we had what I realized was literally the final "defeat all enemies" battle in the game, against an archer, three knights and two monks. The monks had well over 600 HP, quite a bit more than my dragons and behemoths. Our first few attempts went quite poorly (and I posted about it), but then I decided to experiment with letting the enemies come to me and that went a bit better.
Petrification and Gigaflare were the big wins for us. I made an intentional sacrifice play by letting :)( yngiht drib the Cockatrice turn into a crystal after a while, and then I was surprised that my Red Chocobo got poached by the enemy archer. I decided not to reset for this since it was the last non-boss battle in the game anyway, which I think was a good call.
Next was the battle with Loffrey. This battle went amazingly well. A few things worked in my favour here: I had Ampelos the King Behemoth and Root Beer Float the Revenant for proportionate damage, I had generally low faith all around to make the casters mostly irrelevant, and I brought my Mindflayer to further disrupt the casters. I even brought my Greater Malboro, resulting in Loffrey's goons having a wide variety of ailments through the fight.
It was very manageable. The eventual victory came down to Ramza shooting Loffrey at a great distance just once with his Mythril Gun.
Now we're into the Necrohol of Mullonde, which... surely means something.
The first battle here is against Cletienne. It was tough. This one might've taken me ten tries, although some of these attempts were short. Each time, Cletienne would start by aiming Flare at my still-mid-faith Greater Malboro, so I'd counter by using Enlighten on it to make the damage far worse. I tried to hang back to avoid the onslaught from ninjas (the other enemies weren't very scary) but I needed to work on offense. The ninjas and samurais all have over 700 HP in this version, so defeating them by direct damage is pretty pointless. Even Choco Meteor only does ~100 damage depending on compatibility, so I needed to rethink this.
One again, the answer was: assassinate! I brought Root Beer Float and Ampelos and made every effort to get them safely toward Cletienne while the rest of the team was essentially a distraction. An early, strong attempt and my eventual win both involved Root Beer Float literally teleporting all the way across the battlefield (bad odds!) and Drain Touching Cletienne on turn 1.
Beyond that, this required some luck. This included a completely bizarre string of epic dodges on Ramza's part that I managed to capture:
Even though this shows Ampelos missing Cletienne, this was the eventual winning attempt. With Ramza surviving and Root Beer Float camping next to Cletienne, we were able to get another proportionate attack off to win. Er, to almost win. A time mage had thrown Cletienne a Potion, so Ramza also needed to shoot him once at the end, just like with Loffrey.
You might notice that Ramza's HP was a little low in that last battle. That's actually because Loffrey had broken his armor - a Black Costume - and I had forgotten to replace it. Before the battle with Barich, I replaced it with a White Robe to mitigate the elemental damage from guns and tiamats. I also ditched the Featherweave Cloak since evasion wasn't going to matter much for the rest of the game.
Barich seemed like it was likely to be a tough one, but I had the power of iteration! I knew I just needed a bit of favourable positioning and some luck to recruit the terrible flying dragons and this would come together.
I also tried to be strategic without a Tiamat, but I can tell you that it didn't work out. This still probably took fewer attempts than Vaults 4 and Cletienne. I tried really hard to stay to the side that Barich starts on to bring the winged dragons over and keep my party formation tight. Root Beer Float landed a Drain Touch and then spent most of the battle knocked out.
On some attempts, I was greatly helped out by unusual luck on the Tri-Flames and Tri-Thunder.
Eventually, I ended up with some very favourable positioning where the Greater Hydra and then the Tiamat were directly across the short gap from Ramza and he was able to use Entice on them. (Conveniently, the Tiamat was exactly level 50, if that mattered.) I actually got both - but not the normal Hydra - and it was the Tiamat who eventually killed Barich with a Tri-Flame.
This takes us to the graveyard of airships! I wasn't too afraid of these battles because of my assassination team. I went all in on it, actually: the team was Ramza, Boco (for healing), Root Beer Float the Revenant, Ampelos the King Behemoth, and Silkbottom Mars the Gobbledygook. Ramza and Boco were the support, and the other three could all do some heavy lifting.
Honestly, these final three battles all went so easily and quickly that it's sort of hard to elaborate on, but it's really fun to see the big damage numbers. Every member of the team got a chance to shine, that's for sure.
The Ultima fight seemed like it could've been tough because of the Ultima Demons, but they mostly threw out bad spells and targetted Alma (who had reraise status). I also used Ramza's turn to Mimic Darlavon and put a pair of them to sleep successfully twice.
The second form of Ultima had us on the ropes a bit. It must've used Grand Cross five times, but between Ramza's Remedy and Alma's Dispelna (?) we held together. At one point a Divine Ultima was aimed at Alma and I had Ramza walk over to her and Enlighten her. It lowered her magic effectiveness for future spells, but saved her in the short term, and MP was getting low at that point anyway.
I also found Ultima's final form very fast. It was hard to keep up the heals, but we managed.
We won! This was a pretty good challenge. Someone in my GameFAQs thread about this playthrough said this seemed boring but variant play is always about novel solutions to problems and the monsters really allow for that. Though I'll admit - I probably had at least 50 failed battles through this whole thing. Though I know my decisions mattered, there were points where it felt like it was more of a test of patience in saving and reloading than it was in actual strategic skill.
I had seen wpot's threads and guide about OR4M for literal years, so it was really fun to finally do it, and it's amusing that it loosely coincides with the timing of my FF1 with monsters playthrough, too. This was also a nice way to experience the new version of FFT with a bit of a... guiding framework.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles feels like an excellent version of this game. As for its impact on OR4M, these seemingly very inflated enemy HP values definitely change the way you need to approach the end of the game. It basically becomes all about petrification and the three monster types with proportionate damage. Perhaps that does make it less interesting.
It's still a good way to play this game, I think.
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