FreshFeeling Gaming

Shining Force Minimum Party Part VII

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 19:44:09 GMT

Here is the epic conclusion of this minimum party playthrough that was begun in 2017. Perhaps I'll un-abandon another unfinished run sometime soon.

Really, the epicness of this conclusion is questionable. The battles don't go particularly well.

The Colossus battle was tough! I am not sure if perhaps my intentionally sub-optimal 11-person party is a bit underlevelled, but taking on those Chimaeras at the beginning was tough. In the first couple of rounds, things went pretty badly. It may have partly been because of bad positioning, but I definitely also had a ton of missed attacks against Chimaeras. The other thing that was kind of stupid that took me ages to realize (27 minutes in) is that Balbaroy didn't have his new Doom Blade equipped and was just air-punching the enemies.

Again, I don't know the mechanics of this game super deeply. I believe there's both some kind of hit rate formula that uses the agility stat as well as a flag that indicates an enemy's evasion level that's some kind of innate, immutable evasion. I could be wrong about how it works, but regardless it was sort of absurd how many great attackers whiffed terribly against the Chimaeras.

This first battle, which was going terribly even in its first turn, still served a purpose in that I learned which enemies would approach in the first few turns and which ones would end up holding still. For example, I was able to learn that the left-side Chimaeras were the biggest immediate threat and that the Armed Skeletons and Horsemen who appeared a bit north of the starting position pretty much just stand their ground.

There's a point in the video around the 8:50 mark where Pelle misses - about my fourth consecutive miss against Chimaeras - where I throw my arms in the air and say, "What on Earth is happening?! Did we not beat a whole bunch of these guys in the previous battle? I want a do-over strictly for the statistical interest in, like, how this could play out differently, you know?". I stated a plan to re-start the battle on Faris' next turn just because it was going badly, when 20 seconds later this happened:

We defeated zero enemies in this first attempt.

As I said, the second attempt was informed somewhat by the first. I moved up a bit slower and prepared for the Chimaeras coming in from the left. I also used more AoE spells and itemcasts so as to bypass the Chimaera's evasion a couple of times. In fact, between better luck and using fewer evadable attacks, we got one Chimaera down early in turn 2.

Bleu died on turn 2 from a Blue Dragon's ice breath. I noted that Bleu has had awful stat gains since promotion and really hasn't been able to contribute. Bleu losing was something I could accept, but a bit later, with the battle generally going fairly well, this happened:

And that's just absurd. Earnest with the Valkyrie and Evil Ring is a really strong unit, but when a critical attack can land that much damage it's just not something you can account for with tactics. It was not a good feeling. I had bee considering using a Shower of Cure item but once Earnest was gone there's less impact of a mass-heal and, for that matter, less chance I was actually going to win regardless. In fact, the mere idea of Faris being able to be wrecked randomly regardless of what I do really makes the game seem awfully luck-based.

Unfortunately, Earnest's position was the main thing holding the other three Chimaeras back from Faris.

Third try! Bleu and Earnest are back. Once again, mostly keeping the team tightly bunched together, even moreso than attempt 2. The first wave of Chimaeras actually went pretty well, and we defeated them without any casualties.

Alef gained level 20 after casting spells on the second wave of Chimaeras, and I identified that Torasu was going to get level 20 after two more uses of Heal. What got really silly is that Torasu cast Shield on Faris (for 1 experience) and I didn't realize the Shield spell nullified curative spells, too. Thus, twice we tried to heal Faris only to find it ineffective. Consequently, it took a bit of extra time for Torasu to reach level 20. But it happened!

Adam is now the only one unpromoted and still quite far from level 20, naturally. Still, every so often he finds a way to help, like this:

And that was against a Chimaera! Pretty impressive.

We had everyone alive with all of the enemies defeated besides the three Colossus heads. We went left first, and found that this was the Freeze-using head. We were able to gang up on it and only take two Freeze spells. We had exhausted Alef and Torasu's MP pretty much completely by the time we were gathering the force on the right head side to face the Blaze head on the right. Alef did end up using her last 2 MP to cast her own Blaze spell on the head for a few damage, and we took it out while only being targetted by a single Blaze spell.

We took the awkward right-side path to get to the top head, which uses Bolt spells. I actually thought it started moving after the other two heads were defeated but it turns out it only starts moving when your units move into a certain range. I didn't even let Faris get close to it. I kept units scattered until it got somewhat close so that it wouldn't be able to mass-target us too effectively. When we got closer with intent to attack it, naturally we were more able to be mass-targetted.

However, we were able to beat it before its next turn. No casualties!

I went back to town to fix some items and to promote Alef and Torasu.

Then we began the final two battles: Battle 29 vs. Darksol followed by battle 30 vs. Dark Dragon. If you lose during battle 30, you need to repeat battle 29.

I had immaculate strategy during battle 29. I realized pretty quickly that the arena is specifically set up to allow the Torch Eyes to attack you at range as you move through the middle toward Darksol, so I made a plan to wait outside of the central corridor until after the Torch Eyes had both move through and take those out. Torch Eyes are pretty weak enemies at this point, but ~20 defense-piercing damage is never something to be ignored.

It seemed pretty great that nobody had taken a point of damage by this point, and with this favourable positioning.

Besides taking out the enemies on the side of the corridor, I was able to take out Darksol quickly and with little issue. The only casualty was Alef, who I accidentally left open to a single Steel Claw attack. As a level 1 promoted WZRD, that was enough.

We beat Darksol and rolled into the final battle. I had a pretty good setup going, with centaurs managing Armed Skeletons on the left and birdfolk managing the right while the others went around attacking heads. Given that I was subjected to quite a few attacks, especially Demon Blaze attacks, I didn't expect to see Bolt 4 here. Unfortunately, this was the context in which I saw it:

For the second time in this update, there was 55 damage from a completely unexpected source that utterly wrecked the battle! Crap.

So now we're repeating battle 29 and then doing battle 30 again.
The good news is battle 29 really had gone well. I had a good approach to it and it didn't feel especially challenging. Even Darksol himself seems to pick pretty stupid attacks sometimes, like a 1 damage physical attack when he's being assaulted from all sides.

One thing I noted here is that while my force wasn't particularly high-levelled, some of the higher-levelled members like Mae and Amon were now level 25+, and that was starting to seem more like the way a very over-prepared person would play. Well, it was an accident. Most enemies were still giving good experience, including those infinitely-respawning Armed Skeletons in battle 30.

This time, we beat battle 29 with all members alive. We actually blocked the tiles that the Armed Skeletons appear from in battle 30 this time, at first using Adam and Bleu who probably have the least to offer at this point.

Things were going great. I had the left head down, the middle head was almost defeated, and my units were healthy. Then, for some reason, this happened:

I had no idea Bolt 4 could reach that far! It was a bit mystifying that it was capable of doing this every turn so far but hadn't. In a way, I guess this was kind of like good strategy on Dark Dragon's part, really, since Adam was the only unit over there and the one preventing Armed Skeletons from spawning.

I sort of threw caution to the wind to throw the big attacks at the final head quickly. Then the head got stupid. For some reason on its final two turns it cast Freeze 2 on Faris for damage in the 10-20 range. Really not scary.
It was Alef who - with vengeance! - struck down Dark Dragon with an attack I didn't expect to do so much damage.

The only one down on my team was Adam, and we won with just 11 members of the force ever having been recruited. And on a run started 6 years ago! That's pretty unusual. But I'm quite glad not to play the beginning of this playthrough again because it was tough.

The ending of the game ends up being pretty amazing. A whole bunch of people who never joined at all - most of whom you never even met - show up wondering where Faris is. I remarked, this is really the evidence that this style of playthrough and the oversight that allows it is very much, well, an oversight. Everything else just works with this tiny team of characters.

This is a great variant run. Certainly I'd recommend it to a fan of this game. It's a good way to see what it's like to play with few characters at the start of the game, and a good way to try and find the merits in others (like, uh, Adam?) in late game.

To me personally, the big thing it meant was seeing how amazing Amon and Balbaroy could be. Those are not characters I've ever used in late game before, but they can be very strong. I kind of thought Adam might end up being kind of neat too, but at least without a concerted levelling effort that was decidedly not the case.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part VI

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 04:33:30 GMT

In this session, I played battles 24 through 27, making this very likely the second-last update for this playthrough. Probably. Maybe.
I was joined by one of my kids for the start of the stream as well, and he was completely unfamiliar with this game so there was a ground-level explanation of several aspects of this game and this variant playthrough at the beginning.

Battle 24: At the beginning, I was introducing the team to my son. My favourite part of this was when I was starting to say that Adam was awful my son said, "He looks awful; his head has come off!".

Maybe his abysmal stats aren't his worst problem.

This battle went okay. I finally had access to a mage with area-of-effect attacks (and every so often I remember to use itemcast effects, too), and the Demon Masters enemies had some as well, so there was a lot of clustered attacks and healing. Despite some effective Auras, Torasu died pretty early in his very first battle. Alef was the next one to go down, from an Ice Worm who attacked her from full health.

The next exciting thing that happened, besides some pretty good banter with my kid, was Bleu defeating a Minotaur and earning level 20!

Earnest ended up taking out Chaos. Everyone other than Torasu and Alef survived, even Adam.

After this, we were able to use the Swords of Light and Darkness to get the Chaos Breaker.

My son very intelligently observed after the Chaos Breaker appeared that I should go to the other altars to re-claim the Sword of Light and the Sword of Darkness. I don't remember whether that's a thing or not but I wish I did; I wandered out of that room and after getting the Chaos Breaker there's no way back. Balbaroy and Amon really might've benefitted from those swords?

Is grabbing the Sword of Light after the Chaos Breaker a thing? I resolved to look this up but I haven't yet. I'm guessing "no" but it only sort of matters, and I can't go back now anyway.

Battle 25: This battle introduces Horsemen (which is a dumb name) and Armed Skeletons, both of whom are pretty powerful and have some range. It also begins with terrain that's very unfriendly to centaurs, making it pretty hard for the party to stay clustered together. I could try to have Amon, Balbaroy and Bleu do most of the fighting, but I think they would get destroyed (especially the recently-promoted Bleu with his 25 HP).

The battle was going okay, but Balbaroy got defeated by a combination of Cerberus and a strong attack from one Horseman. A while later, I moved Faris into what I thought was an okay spot, but it was a bit too vulnerable in the face of strong ranged attacks from Horsemen.

With Faris at the south edge of the forest, the Horsemen and Armed Skeletons were able to close in and wreck him within a few attacks, even though there were only a few enemies left. I had to repeat the battle.

Unfortunately, almost immediately after we restarted, my son lost interest and left. Oh well. The first hour of the video was pretty entertaining.
Something we discussed, and anecdotally it is true, is that in this playthrough, Balbaroy is strong but dies a lot. And after Balbaroy dies, Amon starts getting criticals, tanking hits, and earning awesome stat gains. I am pretty much certain that there isn't some hidden "spousal vengeance" modifier coded into this game but it has sure felt that way.

One thing that occurred to me in this battle, given Adam's penchant for doing 1 damage, was that I could activate the Power Ring on Adam for an additional temporary attack boost. This did allow Adam to contribute somewhat. Although the Power Ring's Boost effect wore off after one action.

Alef got defeated by a Horseman in one shot, but otherwise this battle generally seemed better-managed. After this, there was a turn where Torasu had no useful Heal targets, so he attacked a Horseman and did 13 damage. Hm. More evidence of the hidden vengeance modifier?

Adam also managed to get an attack off on a Dark Priest after his Boost had ended, and it went like this:

It kind of made me wonder if the Boost effect was accidentally permanent or something like that. The idea lingered in the back of my mind. Was this a thing? I feel like it may be a thing. This one I did look up later and it does seem that there's a known bug related to the Boost effect not ending.

Anyway, the rest of this battle went okay, with Alef as the only casualty this time. Earnest once again ended it.

We entered Runefaust and everyone was happy there. Odd.

Battle 26: We entered the Runefaust Castle and we had to face King Ramladu, who was being controlled by Darksol. I immedately felt like the HP values of the new Chimaera and Blue Dragon enemies were indicative of a pretty large step up in difficulty, but we did this battle in one try. The Chimaeras at the start were absolutely the hardest part, actually. Adam died against the Chimaeras, but everyone else pulled through. They took lots of damage, but we had two reasonable healers now so we managed.

We found an additional Halberd in a chest that we passed off to Mae during the battle, so all three of my active centaurs had some kind of more-potent equipment option.

Somehow, the cluster of Cerberuses (Cerberi?) on the left and Armed Skeletons on the right didn't end up noticing at all while I procured treasures and then carefully positioned my team in front of the Blue Dragons and Horsemen to take them out quite quickly.

We started the assault by going immediately for the Horsemen, who have low HP and defense but nasty attacks with huge range. The blue hexagon spaces in this map are an interesting this because even flying units can't move over them, but this didn't work against us too much. The part of the fight where we battled the Blue Dragons actually went pretty well, and then we just had to mop up the fellas on the side.

Once again, I watched the turn order carefully to act immediately after the Armed Skeletons to send my entire team after them with low risk. It went well. This rolls immediately into the next battle.

Battle 28 vs. King Ramladu: This battle was crazy. The robots went really fast and just tore through the units I left behind, and I moved Faris and a couple of other units to the top of the map to fight the king. I didn't expect him to crush Faris in a single action, but that's pretty well exactly what happened!

Okay, that sucked. The good news that I wasn't aware of is that you get to restart the battle from this point when you re-enter it. The even better news is I bothered to check the "deals" section at the shop and found that the weapon store had two Doom Blades for sale for some reason that I was able to buy to get Amon and Balbaroy a little weapon upgrade. The even more betterer thing is that I could revive Adam! Just kidding, that didn't matter.

On the next attempt, we mostly ignored the robots and moved most of the team up to deal with King Ramladu. We kept Faris out of the way. Some characters who had AoE options did use them on robots where possible, but I wasn't really trying to beat the robots; a large part of the team still got destroyed before they could get close to the king after all, including Alef, Torasu, Adam, Bleu and almost Khris.

The funny thing is that Ramladu still got a hit in on Faris due to my carelessness, but thankfully it was only 41 damage this time. Faris himself took down Ramladu immediately after.

We're heading into the real endgame now.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part V

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 03:39:49 GMT

I picked up and played battle 22 and battle 23.

I had beaten Mishaela, so Faris newly had the Sword of Light and I had arrived in Prompt, the town of stupid people. Shortly after I began, I realized I also had the White Ring, Black Ring, and Evil Ring. The White Ring wasn't a challenge to use but when I tried to equip the Black Ring and Evil Ring on various characters it didn't seem to work for anyone; I seem to remember that being a thing, so perhaps I'm missing something... or maybe the issue is that I haven't recruited over half of the potential characters.

With the new rings, I also opted to give Bleu both the Mobility Ring and Power Ring so he could swap between to meet whatever needs I had.

I was excited to start this one as I knew I'd be recruiting Alef and Torasu soon, though unfortunately that wouldn't be until the very end of this particular play session.

Battle 22: The trek to the Tower of the Ancients (I think that's what it's called?) has some of our first mechanical enemies, which are Jets and Torch Eyes. I recall Jets being pretty nasty although it's possible that's because they're immune to Blaze and/or Freeze, although that doesn't really matter at all for me. I realized pretty quickly I was down a member - Balbaroy - so I decided to Egress almost immediately to revive him. I was sure he would be worth it in a battle like this one with terrible terrain.

Torch Eyes ended up being a different issue; they've got a rather strong defense-ignoring attack that seems to do roughly 20 damage to anyone. After clearing well over half of the map, with Bleu defeated but everyone else doing alright, I accidentally left Faris in an open spot where he was targetted by a Torch Eye for 18 damage and then a Minotaur finished him off with 13 damage.

Oddly, this was the first time I noticed that I guess you lose part of your money when you're defeated in this game? It really hadn't made much of an impact but when you go from 40000 to 20000 gold you notice.

On the next attempt, there were no big strategic differences although I may have been a bit more conservative with how I moved Faris. When he did act, however, it was pretty impactful with the Sword of Light!

That multitarget itemcast with the Sword of Light was really cool. I haven't had a whole lot of area-of-effect attacks in this playthrough so it felt pretty novel, and was reasonably effective to boot. Shortly after that part, however, Balbaroy died again. There were simply too many of those high damage, often defense-piercing attacks.

We won, and then went back to Prompt to revive Balbaroy. I wish the priest in Prompt were in a more accessible location, or that the Prompt folk had been more mindful planning their infrastructure. Perhaps that's part of their "town of stupid people" persona.

I grabbed the Turbo Pepper but I just held it for now. I thought it would be most beneficial for Adam.

Battle 23: This is a really fun battle. I like the layout, I appreciate the winding path for my high-movement units and the benefit my flying units get. The enemies are pretty reasonable, and you can get the Valkyrie spear from a chest. It's generally just great! It does feel somewhat lengthy, though.

I planned early for Earnest to get the Valkyrie because he's so much weaker than Pelle and Mae (both statistically and by level). I made a move for a flying unit to get the Valkyrie early and then pass it off, although this ended up going stupidly because Bleu opened the chest with a full inventory.

I just had Amon bring it to Earnest, just a tad later than I had planned. Everyone was living at this point, which is great because we had already attracted the attention of one of the Wyverns.

I spent some time monitoring the turn order here. In the early game, with the randomization and smaller agility values, it didn't seem like I could use that to my advantage too much. Here, however, I did things like have units act after a Torch Eye moved so that they could attack with lower odds of it getting an attack off at them. With that, we finished quite strong here, with the entire force alive. Bleu continued to make himself useful, too, and ended up at level 18.

With that, Alef and Torasu joined, providing me with my first offensive magic user! I found it a bit jarring that there wasn't one of those "(Alef joined the Shining Force!)" messages with the celebratory music.

I then proceeded to activate the next battle, too, which means I recruited Adam. I evacuated the next battle as soon as possible and did some minor save scumming (live!) to ensure the Turbo Pepper provided him with two permanent movement points. Adam also doesn't get a jingle when he joins but that might be a design decision because he's awful.

I'm still considering whether I regret that Turbo Pepper usage or not.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part IV

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 22:18:25 GMT

Since I picked this back up I've been a bit spoiled by vacation or otherwise free days. Given I was playing pretty late at night I was a little more chill and perhaps a little bit less alert. Yes, that's the excuse I'll use for my performance in Dragonia. Sure.

I did three battles this time, from battle 19 (Dragonia, vs. Ckaine) through battle 21 (vs. Mishaela).

I started in Rudo, so I had to go through the brief story stuff at Dragonia and getting the treasures... which made some of my prior purchasing feel stupid, again. I really don't remember a lot of details of this game.

Battle 19 in Dragonia: Something that mattered greatly is that the majority of my team were now level 1 promoted units. It oughtn't be news to anyone familiar with this game that you take a pretty big stat decrease when you promote, whether you do so at level 20 or not. This really may partly account for how badly these fights went, with Faris the leader being taken out not once but twice.

The first time, Balbaroy had reached level 20 and I positioned Faris with a mind on risk assessment. I figured, losing here wouldn't be a bad thing since I wanted my weaklings to level up a bit (and the cost of losing a battle in this game is pretty much nothing). So, in this case, Faris died but I essentially let it happen, expected it, and sort of stood to benefit from it.

Balbaroy was promoted before I tried again. Characters were gaining levels, and Mae, who was already the first and strongest promoted unit, was super duper pulling ahead. We deal with most of the battle well other than Khris completely whiffing a needed Aura spell (I accidentally pressed a button and thus targetted the wrong unit) and then being taken out early. Earnest gained level 20. Eventually, I decided that this was a great place for my level 1 leader to stand:

I was wrong.

With Earnest's promotion, literally everyone was promoted from level 20 with the exception of our brand new recruit, Bleu. For most characters, when they gain levels after promotion, they get huge bonuses of at least 5 points in one or more stats. And most did! Even Bleu gained some much-needed attack.

In this third attempt, I was cognizant of the behaviours of the lines of Golems and Master Mages in the middle of this battlefield. For some reason, their movement AI doesn't seem to be triggered until you're directly beside them. I was able to have Mae, Earnest and Pelle all stand 1 square away from the Golems throwing spears at them for like four consecutive turns without the enemies taking an action. That said, only Mae was really strong enough for this to be effective so I didn't let it play out completely.

We won on this third attempt, although Balbaroy, Earnest and Khris (for the second time) didn't make it through. Pelle dealt the final blow to Ckaine with his new Halberd.

Battle 20 to the Ancient Castle: This one went considerably better. I was worried because the terrain is terrible for centaurs, who are three of my best characters. The enemies were spaced out enough - and Amon and Balbaroy were strong enough - that I was able to do the majority of the combat just using my flying units without them getting crushed. Every so often, I would have Amon, Balbaroy and Bleu regroup with Khris for an Aura spell.

The centaurs did contribute a bit, especially at the beginning, but Amon and Balbaroy were definitely the MVPs with Bleu being no slouch.

Again, the stat gains tended to be really strong, although Pelle's certainly dropped off quickly. Pelle had joined strong and been one of my strongest units before promotion. While he hadn't become bad or anything, he had a few early post-promotion levels with gains like a single point in two stats.

This battle went great. Bleu gained a couple of levels with good attack stat gains, too.

Battle 21 with Mishaela: I was on the fence about even attempting this, but I decided to proceed given my caffeination. I analyzed the battle layout and decided I'd get every treasure chest, and that I would start by going left. This was great until I triggered the movement of all of the Bowriders; they have rather high attack, and there weren't enough strong units near them to handle it neatly. I mean, they were handled, but there were some close calls.

After Balbaroy and Bleu got mangled badly by the Bowriders, Pelle was able to jump in and help them deal with the situation.

The next nasty situation came from Faris grabbed a treasure chest that I didn't realize would attract the attention of a Belial when Faris had no supporting units anywhere nearby. Eventually, it was Faris stalling a battle against two Belials on his own, at level 3. It ended up that I used his Shower of Cure item (I believe this is the game's rarest and best healing item) to stay alive... but it worked, so I don't regret that. Balbaroy was able to pop in to support Faris in time.

We got all of the chests, including the three magic rings, and then surrounded Mishaela with all of her backup eventually defeated. Given boss regeneration and evasion and whatnot, however, it didn't feel like defeating her was a given.

Khris' MP was exhausted, and Balbaroy was defeated by Mishaela's Bolt spells, but Amon eventually vengefully took Mishaela down with a double attack.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part III

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 04:11:54 GMT

Just to remind of the circumstances, Part I was adapted from a collection of GameFAQs forum posts I wrote in mid-2017. Revisiting the topic renewed my interest in this run, so I picked it up in mid-2023. This is the second time I've picked up this game to play in six years. It's weird. And this surely informs some of my decision making.

Between last session and this one, I had quickly browsed YouTube to see whether there were other folks playthroughs posted. I found two playthroughs that existed: one by a user called Ductape from 2018, which is complete and has no commentary, and one by a user called ThatZooooooooo from 2012, which is not complete and has too much commentary. This ThatZooooooooo fellow's personality may be pretty well the opposite of mine, but it's kind of funny that his playthrough seems to end just before Bustoke Quarry where my previous session began; thus, if you wanted to see a complete playthrough of this challenge, you could start with his and then jump into mine and besides the absurdly stark change in the tone of the player it might be pretty seamless.

This time, I managed to play for over three and a half hours, and finished quite a bit! We proceed from Battle 13 (Uranbatol Fortress) through Battle 18 (Road to Dragonia). Given the length, as always you can choose to take or leave the recording and I'll discuss the highlights briefly here.

Battle 13 - Uranbatol: I did this in one attempt, with no casualties. These enemies didn't provide particularly good experience for much of my team, with the exceptions of the two Hellhounds and one Artillery. In particular, the Dark Priests who first appeared back in Battle 8 really don't provide more than a single experience point for anyone at this point. This was sort of the theme today; while battle strategy comes into play and is discussed, most of what I'm doing is attempting to maximize experience gains.

It's important to me to promote my units at 20 to ensure they're nice and strong at endgame, given the reduced and sub-optimal party I know I am going to have. Would it be a big deal to do it with lower-levelled promotions? Not really, no. But I can, and it's interesting to me, so I'm doing it. Thus, I'm really trying to have my higher-levelled units target the enemies with bigger experience yields.

There's a slight degree of risk in delaying the entire team's promotions so much, as the game is designed anticipating units are all promoted in chapters 4-6 and units generally have much stronger stat gains after promotion. So if you wait too long (in terms of game progression) you can artificially add a fair bit of challenge. There is also the matter of the act of promotion bringing your stats down when you do it, so you may want to "choose your moment" with care. As with the idea of holding out until 20, this is unlikely to matter a whole lot but it's something to consider.

Anyway, Battle 13 was nothing special. We gained a little bit of experience. Earnest joined and we backtracked briefly to provide him with a nice, strong Power Spear. Earnest joins at level 8, so I also transferred Mae's Power Ring onto Earnest to help him keep up and catch up.

Battle 14 vs. Balbazak: This battle features Seabats, who are known to yield high experience for this part of the game and without anyway especially notable difficulty. I used Egress to repeat this battle several times to make use of these Seabats as well as the Hellhounds and Artillery, all of whom give good experience on units up to level 18. Only one enemy in this battle has any form of AoE and there aren't a lot of defense-penetrating abilities in play, so it feels "safe".

After the first run-through, Pelle was level 14, Earnest was level 9, Faris was level 15, Amon was level 15, Khris was level 15, Mae was level 17, and Balbaroy was level 13.
After the second run-though, Pelle was level 16, Earnest was level 11, Faris was level 15, Amon was level 15, Khris was level 16, Mae was level 17, and Balbaroy was level 14. Amon got killed by Balbazak right before I was leaving anyway.

During the third run-though, I positioned Khris a bit stupidly and she got killed in the early going.

By the end of this third battle at the docks, Pelle was level 16, Earnest was level 12, Faris was level 16, Amon was level 16, Mae was level 18, and Balbaroy was level 14. Near the end, I checked stats and realized that Balbaroy's stats were pretty substantially worse than Amon's, which convinced me that maybe Balbaroy was the best candidate to use the Power Ring. Faris got double-attacked and killed by Balbazak which neatly ended the battle when I was hemming and hawing about doing a fourth round, so that was a treat.

On the fourth and final run-through... well, we still didn't get anyone to level 20, but I was ready to be done. Levels were creeping up, especially for Earnest (actually, he was still at 12), but it was getting less noticeable. Anyway, Mae sealed the deal.

Battle 15 on a boat: I didn't remember the details of this one at all. We did it in one attempt and with no casualties. Again, I paid much more attention to experience gains than actual strategy (the game hasn't felt tricky since Battle 8, frankly). Pegasus Knights reappear here and I think they've got the same HP totals? Anyway, this one ended very quickly.

In Waral, we grabbed a bit of gear from the shop including some of the promotion-dependent equipment in advance (this would turn out to be kind of dumb). We also snagged the Mobility Ring; given that only Faris and Khris have really limited movement, I put the Mobility Ring on Faris, at least for now.

Battle 16 under Waral: The worms and upgraded skeletons were once again giving fairly good experience to my characters whose levels were in the high teens, so I ended up doing this battle twice... and definitely not because of the difficulty.
By the end of the second go-round, Faris was level 18, Mae was level 19, Khris was level 18, Amon was level 18, Balbaroy was level 17, Pelle was level 19, and Earnest was level 15.

Battle 17 on a boat: Almost immediately, Mae reached level 20. I quickly use Egress to promote her, figuring otherwise any experience she earns goes to waste.

This battle also has enemies who appear partway through. My characters were being poisoned a little bit, which was kind of new and interesting. I had no means at all to cure poison, so I just left them alone and healed the HP of the ones who needed it most.

The Conch and Shellfish enemies were terrible at providing experience; any experience I was gaining really seemed to be coming from Seabats and the Gargoyle (who may or may not have been running the show here). Nobody else got level 20, although lots of folks were close now: Pelle, Khris and Faris all got to 19 here.

In Prompt, we got to feel stupid for buying Steel Lances earlier because the better Chrome Lances appear here. I also grabbed one (currently useless) Guardian Staff here for a later character based on advice that LastJustice offered in May 2017.

Battle 18 - Road to Dragonia: I didn't cure Amon and Earnest's poison, so I abandoned the battle pretty quickly to run back for a quick cure. I entered the battle a second time, and while I remembered that there were appearing enemies, they didn't seem to be triggering, so Balbaroy and Amon ended up waaay up front. This ended up causing some difficulty for my centaurs in the middle of the map who could barely move in thick forest.

While things did get a bit worse at this point, it also presented opportunity: the Master Mages and Worms allowed for the force to get a few levels. Pelle was first. I was ready to Egress to do this battle again, and it was also an opportunity to make Pelle into a PLDN. Sensing this opportunity, I decided to repeat this battle.

Something unusual about using Egress and re-doing a battle with hidden enemies is that the appearing enemies are on the map right away when you restart, and with their AI active. This makes repeating this battle actually quite different. Having that forward wave of Master Mages and Worms backed by Golems was actually quite tough, and there were some serious close calls. I think it was legitimately harder the second time!

Pelle also died in the worst of the assault, getting surrounded and pounded by Golems while still at promoted level 1. Despite the hardship, Mae's giant HP pool post-promotion gives me quite a bit of hope for the future:

In the course of this second real iteration of this battle, Faris, Khris and Amon all reached level 20 (with Earnest and Balbaroy at 19). Rather than walking into Dragonia, we walked back into Prompt, did some promotions and some equipping.

I am looking forward to Dragonia in the next part, including a new recruit to level up some more.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part II

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:14:06 GMT

In working on this blog, it's been interesting documenting old runs and in some cases finding existing documentation of old runs and just adapting that. Naturally, there's something authentic about getting immediate impressions from the time of the experience, and ultimately that's the idea and goal going forward. At the outset though, I just wanted to start by ensuring I had written notes about existing runs because I like this kind of thing.

Anyway, in addition to finding documentation of old runs... it's an interesting thing to actually find an old run. On a whim when I had a pretty well a full day without responsibilities, I decided to check whether I could capture from a Wii and whether this Shining Force save was there... and I found I could, and it was. So here we are with our second update for a run that began in May 2017!

In this session, I played battles 8 (Bustoke Quarry) through 12 (vs. General Elliot).

Depending how informed you are on this challenge, it's worth noting that there's a published guide to the Minimum Party Playthrough on GameFAQs, but that it says you require Diane; you don't. There are a few characters like Diane where the game positions you right in front of them to get them to join, but you don't actually need to talk to them. Thus, my playthrough is deviating a little bit from the known standard, if that's a thing.

I hope it's understandable that I took some time to get my bearings, but returning to this game-in-progress after 6 years was actually fairly easy.

Battle 8: Pretty quickly, I found that Mae was the clear MVP of the team, getting fast turns and having her typical stellar defense. I would use her to soften up skeletons for Amon and Balbaroy to defeat so that they would earn more experience. I also tried to get Amon and Balbaroy to go after mages and archers since they could deal more appreciable damage to these softer targets than they could to skeletons.

My first run at Bustoke Quarry in this video (which wasn't actually my first run at this battle; I had levelled Amon and Balbaroy at least a little bit here back in 2017) didn't go super well. Given the tiny party size, I expected this. The good news is, you don't lose a whole lot in defeat in this game and it's an opportunity to level up. Khris got sniped by an archer pretty quickly when I was careless with her position, and given the presence of mages I knew I was going to need her healing.

Faris was knocked down 1 HP shortly after Khris was clobbered, so at that point I was more focused on optimizing experience gains rather than actually winning. Balbaroy was defeated by a mage's Blaze spell, and Amon by the Master Mage's Freeze spell shortly after. It wasn't long before Faris lost his last HP; we could possibly have found a way to win with just Mae and Faris but there's some value in additional fighting. In the course of this, Faris was level 11, Mae earned level 13, and Balbaroy and Amon both reached level 8.

In the next attempt, having got my feet under myself, things went better! The additional levels and some luck may have contributed too, but I definitely paid more attention to the spacing from archers and other things. The entire party survived, with Faris level 12, Mae level 13, Khris level 12, Balbaroy level 10, and Amon level 9. I picked up the Moon Stone, which was dumb since I'm not recruiting Zylo. I guess someone will have to carry that around for all eternity now. Ah well.

I realized a bit too late that Mae could've upgraded her weapon - a pretty substantial upgrade! - before this battle. Whoops.

Battle 9: Given that there's only one or two battles we won on the first try so far, I wasn't super optimistic about this battle. That lack of optimism turned out to be unfounded! This battle went great. Despite the team's very different capacities for movement in forests, we managed to stay clustered and avoid a lot of attacks from enemies. Mae's impressive attacks kept the team relatively safe from the dangerous pegasus knights here.

Against the lizardman right near the end, Mae readied an attack, and I said, "Here comes Mae the destroyer!", and then this happened:

In this session sometimes it really felt like Mae was carrying the team. She does have a Power Ring equipped but I still find myself pretty surprised. Everyone got through this one alive without too much danger, and everyone gained one level here.

Battle 10 vs. Laser Eye: I've always enjoyed this one! My strategy was to have Mae - who I knew could tank some hits - rush through to the safe spot halfway across the land bridge while Khris and Faris would wait and then catch up later. This mostly worked out, although Amon and Balbaroy did end up drawing aggro and ending up in some dangerous spots part way through. The Laser Eye itself only attacked its allies with its first blast, and somehow ended up hitting Mae (which was a known risk) and Amon (I didn't realize this space could be targetted) with its second.

Despite it being indicated, I glossed over it and had no idea Amon could be targetted in this spot:

I thought the laser was just a neat 3-tile-row thing.

But it worked out! Once again, we won on our first try and with the whole team alive. Mae was up to level 15, Khris at 14, Amon at 11, Balbaroy at 12, and Faris still at 13. Pelle joined at level 8, and I was relieved to see that his stats were actually still pretty comparable to Mae.

Battle 11 vs. General Elliot: This one did end up taking two tries. I wasn't careful with the way General Elliot's "waves" move and got completely swarmed, with Faris being the only casualty... and in fairly short order.

So we took a second swing at it with a much more controlled approach. I thought it might be smart to put Mae and Pelle way out front, and then pull them back once they had the enemies' attention. This ended up working, where when Mae and Pelle pulled back, some enemies started moving back into their original formation. This was a very good way for my team to get the drop on the pegasus knights and generally have better control over enemy targetting.

General Elliot himself was kind of stupid. Nobody stood next to him for a long time, and Mae and Pelle stood there throwing spears into his face repeatedly without him doing a darn thing.

Consequently, this wasn't too hard. Levels ended up with Faris at 14, Mae at 16, Khris at 14, Amon at 12, Balbaroy at 12, and Pelle at 11.

For some reason I remembered there being more than one battle against General Elliot, but perhaps I just remembered doing it more than once because I was losing, or because I wanted Heat Axes or something.

Next we're heading for Balbazak. We'll get to recruit Ernest and we have the privilege of fighting oddly-high-experience-yielding sea bats.

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Shining Force Minimum Party Part I

Sun, 21 May 2023 00:41:08 GMT

[This entry is adapted from the original GameFAQs posts written around the time the gameplay took place in May of 2017. It is actually being posted in May of 2023. There may be minor edits.]

I've been gradually doing the start of a minimum party challenge in Shining Force for a couple of weeks off and on. I've been doing it on my Wii of all things, so streaming and screenshots aren't easy. Then again, who the eff would ever want to watch this? What an incredibly tedious challenge!

It's pretty clear that the dude who wrote the minimum party challenge guide only played on an emulator.

Battle 1: Clearing the first battle took me about 9 tries, no lie. Hero was level 7, I think, when I won. I didn't think to go save at the priest near Gong, so I was repositioning the blond guy to leave Guardiana every time. I only realized I could've saved myself so much trouble at the beginning of battle 2.

Battle 2 took two tries.

Battle 3 took two tries. It was nice having Mae, and you start to learn a lot about the stupid enemy AI when you've got a single fast-moving potentially ranged attacker. I think Hero was about 7 and Mae was 5 or 6.

Battle 4 took two tries because of a critical miss by hero against the mage. I feel like I notice misses and enemy criticals much more when playing this way. Khris (which autocorrects to Khrushchev - heh) was probably a solid level 5 by the end. I actually used two maxed power potions on her because my inventory was full, so gaining her some XP was fairly painless. And that's a thing: managing inventory with 2 and 3 characters is a pain. I haven't been maxing levels but I made sure my stat items uses were maxed.

Battle 5 took two tries. I was dumb. I took the far right path and then went across the very top of the big desert and, given a chance to sneak Hero into Manarina, I thought, "Lets take a swing at this mage". Got criticaled by a zombie.

Battle 6 (increasingly unsure that I've numbered things correctly) was my first battle won in a single attempt! Lots of Mae hitting zombies with a spear at range for 1 damage. At this point, having skipped the initial crew, Anri, and anyone else more obviously optional, I had Hero (actually named Faris) at level 10 or 11, Mae at level 11, and Khris at level 8 or 9.

Battle 7 (Circus/Marionette): This took two tries... barely. On the first one, I had cleared the field when Hero took a nasty Freeze 3 to the face that barely crept up to his HP. I had the Marionette surrounded by my three characters - all of whom were level 8+ and able to consistently do ~8 damage, but there were also lots of misses and the boss regeneration feature working against me. So yeah, I lost, but it was close.

That said... unlike most enemies, the clowns and puppets still provided actual experience, at least for Khris. Dreading the upcoming Shade Abbey battle, it provided a good excuse to get Khris up to level 10. I remembered that I had the Power Ring (equipped on Mae) and, by using it on Hero/Faris, the ring allowed me to beat Marionette much more safely and easily.

Battle 8 (Shade Abbey): This took two tries. The first was going really well but Hero of course took a skeleton critical to the face that he wasn't prepared for.
I felt like I had a really good strategy here. The whole team would hide amongst the pews, with Hero facing the aisle, Mae behind him (she's tankier and less risky, but has range!), and Khris in the back supporting mostly with heals. I expected this battle to be much worse than it was as I recalled Mae doing 1 damage to zombies over and over a few battles ago, but it wasn't bad at all... especially with a few Power Ring uses and my strategy allowing only one enemy to hit anyone on my team at a time.

I'm up to the quarry, my Force now has 5 members. I skipped Diane: the published minimum party guide mentioned earlier says she is mandatory, but in fact it's very easy to avoid her. Anri and Diane are funny characters to skip as you meet them and you're instructed to talk to them... you even stand directly next to Diane. I can't blame people for thinking they're mandatory, but they aren't. The game's actual minimum party is Hero/Max, Mae, Khris, Balbaroy, Amon, Pelle, Earnest, Bleu, Alef, Torasu, Adam. 11 members.

I think my three veterans (Faris, Mae, Khris) are all level 12.

As crazy as it sounds I think Adam might get my eventual turbo pepper.

I am considering starting over mainly because I was playing on Wii VC and I'd rather play on PC.

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