Okay so I guess there
is a village I missed on my first time exploring the globe. Okay. Fine. Sure. I'm sure it's nothing important and there's nothing of note there.
God
dammit.
And now you know why we were all pushing so hard for that one extra village
The mechanical aesthetic is doing wonders here, with gunship-style turrets pointed directly at our ship that you can see in the far background, and the enemy sprites themselves being actual cannons that have to be fought with sword and magic - Final Fantasy's blend of sci-fi and fantasy is really doing the work here. There are four artillery positions that have to be fought one at a time, moving the ship to confront each one in a sequence. Each one is a powerful opponent in its own right, with some high-damage missile attacks and - bizarrely - a rocket attack that confuses the target and turns it against my party. However, what they all have in common is a crippling Lightning weakness; between Faris's Thundara, Galuf's Ramuh, and Bartz's Spellblade, they are all dealt with quickly (Lenna ends up being a liability, as she's hit by the confuse missile and immediately takes out Faris in one punch).
Fun Blue Magic Fact: you can learn flamethrower and missile from these guys. I mean you can learn them elsewhere too, but they are some decent extra Blue options in fire damage + iirc a gravity effect from the missile attack.
Old is a new status and I don't really know what to make of it, other than it has a neat sprite effect where it turns the character's hair white:
Zerban covered it pretty well, but basically the longer it lasts the lower your stats go, so it's a good idea to either cure this or kill your enemies ASAP. It's
very useful as a status effect to use against enemies when you get access later though.
As you can see, Level 5 Death plays a sick-ass animation and also kills everyone who is a level multiplier of 5, which means everyone except Faris dies. All I have to do afterwards is raise Galuf and kill the beast so that Galuf is registered as having been affected by the spell and the party learns it.
It is a huge pain in my ass.
What I forgot is that the monster can just cast LV5D again, killing Galuf again. And Faris can't beat the monster on her own, because she's too busy casting Raise. And Galuf can barely win the fight on his own, because his Blue Magic spells kind of suck??? I should have checked which ones are good at dealing damage I can't remember and Aera isn't doing shit. Of course I raise other characters, but they also die to LV5D.
I basically exhaust most of my MP and beat my head against the desk for a while before I pull it off.
I am like... 60% certain that in the Pixel version of FFV, you can actually leave your Learn party member dead and still get the spell, pretty sure I did that at some point in this playthrough. Entirely possible I'm wrong though, and it's not like many other upcoming Blue spells are as absolute as Level 5 Death.
Then I get lost.
Specifically, what happens is that to enter the library, you need to play a small puzzle game with hidden buttons that move bookshelves. It's fairly simple, except I have never done it from the other side to walk back out, and when after poking for a bit I fail to find a button to shift the bookshelves and leave the library, I jump to the extremely dumb conclusion that "well, the first time I had to go all the way through and find Mid who opened a secret exit, so I assume I am supposed to leave through that exit," because that's how my brain works sometimes.
So I just go through the whole library with my party on low MP and a monster that needs to be killed instantly whenever I spot it because it can trap me in the Level 5 Death hell again. It's not a great time. But thankfully, I end up finding the room at the end where Mid had his secret exit!
Which does not exist anymore. It was a plot shortcut and we can't take it.
So I have to walk ALL THE WAY BACK and poke around until I finally find the correct bookshelf I missed the first time around like an idiot.
ANYWAY.
Ahahaha oh
man you would not believe how much time I spent running back and forth in that damn library, getting lost and trying to figure out how to go backwards at times. Because Level 5 Death? That isn't even the only Blue Magic there, you can also get several others from the other Pages (one even requires !Control).
I am absolutely prepared to never enter the damn Ancient Library again.
I have no idea what's going on with the Archeoaevis. Despite Tycoon's warning, it nevever gives any visible sign of changing its elemental weakness. Libra gives nonsensical information - the level it tells me the enemy is changes with each casting, its HP number is a lie (1,600 HP would make this a trivial fight, but it obviously has more HP than that and Libra still tells me he's at 1600/1600 even after dealing a couple thousand damage to him), and it says he's "vulnerable to wind," which I can't test since Blue Mage is my only wind-elemental attacker and I walked into this fight with Galuf as a Summoner.
Without any good information, all I can do is try hitting him as hard as I can with everything I got. Some attacks appear to deal 0 damage, but I can't parse the logic for it. Eventually I wear him down and 'kill it', whereupon it plays the disintegration sprite… Then roars back to life.
So you pretty much covered it at the end of the update there, but yeah Archeoaevis has what is essentially half a dozen different forms with their own stats and weaknesses, which it swaps to each time one goes down. It's just that for whatever reason, only the last one has any real indicator.
I'm pretty sure I just blitzed down most of the forms with 1000 Needles and a Ninja, then tossed out Level 5 Death at the end.
For now, let's talk jobs! The Earth Crystal unlocked four:
Samurai is a new addition to the series. I believe it has some kind of busted power where you throw money at the enemy for crazy damage? I don't know anything else about it.
Dragoon is our old friend returned. I have a thing for dragoons personally speaking, so if it's at all viable, I'd like to have one of the party members upgrade/sidegrade into it. Maybe Lenna?
Dancer is also new; it's some kind of support class that dances to provide passive bonuses and also has access to some unique valuable equipment like ribbons?
Chemist I know literally nothing about, other than some items I've gathered in the game tell me that they are used 'by a chemist,' and there are a bunch of items (the energy drink series) that I haven't been able to use so far and which the game tells me 'are used with the Drink command,' and Archeoaevis just gave me five of those, so I assume that Chemist is the job that uses them.
New job assessments let's gooooo
Samurai - Samurai is... honestly borderline broken. They've got a passive which can also be learned in only like 10 AP that gives them additional dodge chance (and stacks with shields, Elven Cloak, and Main Gauche), they've got Zeniage which is basically "I pay money to automatically win fights", they've got a paralyze on command infinite use ability, they cap off with Odin-lite with an AoE instakill sword draw... Top it off with having full access to heavy armor and shields and also Katanas which have inate crit and you have an absolute beast of a class, even if they aren't really part of the big endgame physical murder combo. If you're doing any kind of challenge run though? Easy pick if you have the option.
Dragoon is Dragoon. They Lance, They Jump. Honestly with the dramatically lowered cast times on spells in FFV compared to FFIV Jump always felt like it took too long for me, and otherwise the only thing they have going for them is... actually not that useful for physical fighters. That is, they get an ability called !Lancet which scales on the users magic attack and drains HP and MP from one enemy. Considering the scaling and the MP gain, take a wild guess which classes benefit most from a dip in Dragoon?
Dancer, much like Bard, has the durability of wet tissue paper, but the Dance command has some funky stuff going for it. On one hand it's randomized so you might get useless things like "try to confuse a boss who is immune", on the other hand Sword Dance does something like x4 damage so if you get lucky you have ridiculous damage output. Also, only class other than Freelancer that can natively equip Ribbons for that sweet sweet status immunity suite, and they even learn an ability to give it to other classes (though as usual passives are rarely as good as having a second command ability). Realistically though you just find the Dancing Dagger and slap it on someone to get the effects of Dancer without nearly as many drawbacks.
Chemist, is "Did you read the Wikipedia Article", the class. If you're just experimenting and writing things down maybe, it can be okay. If you know where to farm all the materials for their !Mix ability and what combos to use, they shatter the game in half with things like "so then I doubled the entire party's level and spent the rest of my turns casting Shadow Flare". Up to you if you want to try said farming and wikipediaing, I usually consider it too much bother since the game is broken easily enough in other ways.
No, Galuf! You didn't leave a replacement behind!! There's a hole in the party, Galuuuuuuuuuuuuf!!!
God this is always the biggest pain in any RPG with a super set party like FFV that doesn't shuffle them around much. Suddenly someone's missing out on all the EXP (and ABP).
