Also as a general note @Omicron if you're ever not sure what to do with a character, mastering Monk (for best stamina and thus max health and best strength and counter if they're gonna do physical attacks), Thief (for best in game agility and various useful passives), and Summoner (for best in game magic if they're gonna do any spells or other magic scaled things) will basically always improve freelancers etc compared to not doing those.
It's not necessary to obsessively master them with every character to beat the game, but you'll basically always benefit even if you don't want the more obvious skills from those classes.
Odin has 14,000 HP, which isn't much for a boss that level, but I have to deal that much damage in under one minute or I lose regardless. Zantetsuken is a heavy party wide attack but it only really matters insofar as it might require Krile to spend a turn healing instead of contributing to DPS. I used Libra but it didn't identify any elemental weakness, which seems like it means I can't use Spellblade…
…except.
Odin isn't immune to Petrify.
Which means I can make Bartz a Freelancer, equip him with Mystic Knight's Spellblade to grant his sword Break properties, then Ranger's Aim to guarantee a 100% hit rate on the next turn and kill Odin in a single blow.
Then I remember Catoblepas exists and I summon him, winning on Turn 1 before Odin has time to act or Bartz time to complete his setup.
In an ironic twist of fate, I turned around only to instantly wipe to Objets d'Art after running out of summon MP and temporarily forgetting how they're supposed to be fought without spamming Titan, so I had to reload the Odin fight anyway.
What a twist. Unfortunately for Faris's suddenly renewed hopes, Syldra isn't alive as such - in fact, Faris is the only one who can see Syldra, as indicated by her sprite's translucent filter. Well, Faris… and Krile, our child wonder.
;_;
Syldra's spirit lives on, after a fashion, and she wants to help Faris - in a way now familiar, by joining us as a summon.
And what a summon it is.
Also given she mostly only appeared as a head over the waves, it's nice to have confirmation that Syldra is a plesiosaurid kind of thing. Also that attack deals in the 3,400 damage range.
I've been stuck with Titan as my most powerful summon, who is both useless against floating opponents and starting to really lag behind in raw power, for what seems like forever. But Syldra is a straight upgrade; she gives me access to a Wind-elemental attack, something I don't have outside of Blue Mage right now, does not fail to floating opponent, and is more powerful than Titan besides.
Welcome on the team, Syldra, your service is appreciated o7.
"Even in Death, I still serve." - Adeptus Astartes DreadnaughtSyldra
Yeah, the old girl wasn't going to let something as small as death stop her.
That, huh, is not going to happen.
Each Sylda summon does around 3k damage and Faris can dualcast them with halved cost from the Golden Pin, Bartz has somehow decided to get off his ass and start doing meaningful damage with his attack (the Hayate Bow randomly causes him to use Rapid Fire way ahead of class progression), Lenna is two-handing Excalibur, and Krile has Quick to ensure she can combine buffs and healing every turn. Bahamut's Atomic Breath is briefly a threat - a laser beam attack that hits everyone for heavy damage - before it turns out Krile's Curaga can heal all damage from it completely while everyone piles on the attacks.
We've cleared the Dragon King with the entire team at full HP. Goddamn.
So you basically chumped two bonus bosses/summons in one update. Nice.
Do some cross country chocobo riding?
Boko is still faithfully waiting for us by this cave's entry.
And then we go do the 'run around the entire world' thing. You can kinda see the path we too in the mini-map above, I think? Some of the passages are pretty tight but there is one uninterrupted, continuous route across the major northern continents. Once we do, we head back into Phantom Town to receive our reward:
And he gives me the Mirage Vest, a piece of main gear which causes the character with it equipped to start every battle under the effect of the Blink spell/Mirage ability, which seems… really good? Blink basically creates two illusory duplicates, and attacks aimed at the character instead miss and delete one of the duplicates. "Two free dodges" seems like a pretty solid effect, especially for a shirt (headgear and accessories are competing with a lot of special item effects), but I don't know if the stats also back it up. For now, I'm equipping it on Krile.
Gargoyles: "Stay back, foolish mortals! This place is too dangerous for ones such as... wait, are those Bahamut and Odin...?!" *instantly get creamed* "OH COME ON!"
Yes, I do in fact have all the party members attack themselves until they're all dead and Lenna is still standing. Yes, even Krile.
Now, is doing the whole dungeon with only one character, one that has zero support abilities, an act of impossible hubris?
I mean, is it hubris if I win?
Lenna alone is a powerhouse. Samurai is just very tough and strong as a baseline, but she also has one of the legendary weapons equipped, Masamune has the special effect that Lenna starts every turn with a full ATB gauge, and she is two-handing it thanks to Knight levels, meaning she hits for around 3,000+ damage. That's enough to kill most enemies in either one or two hits. Now, that might not be enough - if I roll five enemies, Lenna simply won't have time to kill them all before she takes a dozen of attacks.
But in that case she can just use Zeninage to wipe out the enemies from her full ATB gauge before they got to do anything.
So yeah, Lenna can solo (most of) the island shrine. She quickly grabs the two levels I wanted for her, at which point I can raise the rest of the team and get back to normal dungeoneering.
Girl be working out some issues, you know. She lost her father, then her wind drakes, then her whole country to some freak void storm, and then got possessed by an evil snake lady. You know the bad guys are all starting to look like stress balls to her right now. Or punching bags. Or target practice.
At one point during my trek I run into the problem that spamming Dualcast Bahamut is, huh, expensive. The base summon is 66 MP a pop; even with the Gold Hairpin (which you need to constantly re-requip whenever the game thinks Faris would look better with a hat), that's still 33 MP, or 66 total when Dualcasting. And then I start running out of aether.
Which is when I realize a fantastic thing about the job system: I can just swap Faris to Black Mage and dualcast Osmose to refill her HP for free.
This is only my second time playing through a game with the job system (Tactics Advance doesn't really count), so I don't have the intuitive reflex of swapping jobs all the time to best take advantage of the system, but when it clicks it feels really good.
I can definitely see how this would be one of the most popular early FFs (at least among people who got to play it, given its late translation), or one of the most replayable. Now You're Thinking With Jobs moments just feel really good.
Which is a real pity the West wasn't introduced to it earlier. It could have given FF6 and FF4 a real run for their money.
Eventually, we make it to the end of the dungeon and the tablet… Where one of Exdeath's minions ambushes us!
I've compared FFV to an anime many times already (the comparison comes to mind more easily than TTRPG session because, as much as I love a good RPG, my hours watching anime dwarf my hours playing D&D), and in this context, Wendigo is one of these one-episode gimmick antagonists who almost manage to kill the protagonists when they reveal their special trick, but then they are progressively dismantled as the protagonists figure out what their deal is and the antagonist is fundamentally unthreatening once you know how to watch out for their trick.
In this case, opening up with an attack from Lenna causes the first Wendigo hit to take 3k+ damage, then that Wendigo flashes; when I act next with Faris summoning Bahamut, it only damages one of the Wendigo - it's not that the others take 0 damage, like it would be if they were immune to Mega Flare; only one Wendigo registers the hit at all, with the others showing no mechanical acknowledgement of having been hit. That one Wendigo does take 3k damage (so Bahamut is only about as powerful as a two-handed Masamune attack from Lenna, but normally hitting the whole enemy screen), then each individual Wendigo casts Frost, an ice-elemental attack that hits my whole screen for around 200-300 damage, which means I am hit by it four separate times and the whole group is near-death.
Which is the point at which the gimmick is up.
There is only one Wendigo. He is using an illusion technique and moving between illusions. Every time I successfully attack him, he takes damage, his sprite flashes, and he becomes one of the other four Wendigo on the screen. There is only one Wendigo HP pool, so it's not a matter of destroying the illusions to get at the real one; the illusions simply don't acknowledge attacks, and there is no actual way of telling apart which of the Wendigo is the real one. In addition, any time I make an attack which hits the whole enemy screen, all four Wendigos react with Frost for massive overall damage.
The answer is easy. Turtle down, and use single-target attacks on each of the Wendigos in turn until we found the real one and it swaps, rinse and repeat. It's just a matter of luck, healing, and patience. Wendigo's individual attacks are not very dangerous, and Hastega ensures we have an action economy advantage even with "four" enemies on the screen.
I want to throttle whoever came up with the Optimize command. I would literally it didn't exist, because if I had to manually slot my weapons I wouldn't do shit like "forget I own the Brave Sword because it's stuck at the bottom of the list and never equips." I genuinely hate this, it's not a minor annoyance, it's an actual aggravation because all the best and most useful gear is stuff I keep not using because the game lies to me and expects me to correct its mistakes. Fuck you.
I don't think there's anything important that I have missed that I could have revisited, unless... Maybe the Moogle Village? I don't think I had an opportunity to revisit it with Krile in the party... Yeah, I think if there's anything I missed it's no big deal.
Yeah, Melusine in FFXIV is also "snake lady", although mostly the "lamia" model of a skimpily clad top half of a woman on a snake bottom. She's the boss of Turn 2 of the Second Coil of Bahamut raids, ie T7 for the fan numbering, and is largely a spellcaster too.
Possibly due to (mythological) Medusa references, FFXIV Melusine has lots of petrification mechanics. FFV seems to have avoided that.
Yeah, I can immediately recognize a couple of the raid bosses from FFXIV Omega Deltascape, just from the sprites.
Incidentally FFXIV Melusine is a good example of one of the many perils of 3D character design. Sprite-based characters can look like basically whatever you can draw, and notably, when you're making snake people, you can just give them huge tails that make them imposing and snake-like.
When you're designing a 3D game, though, you actually need to give every character a skeleton you can animate. And when you're designing a big important boss, sure, you can pull out all the stops and make something complicated with intricate architecture because you have the budget. But when you're designing one midboss for a Coil series in the already stretched-thin, over-schedule and over-budget, what do you do?
You do this.
Which wouldn't be so bad, if later when introducing a major race of snake people they hadn't just gone "fuck it, we already have the skeleton, let's do this," and now every single one of the snake people in the game looks like their tail literally can't support their bodyweight or, in fact, like they are mermaids. Because I'm pretty sure that's what actually happened here. Someone made a mermaid, then Melusine called for a snake person and they went "close enough!"
This is such a cheap, unmeaningful "heroic sacrifice" that I genuinely didn't even remember it happened. Since Lenna is still not in the party for the Melusine fight, I always think we're beating up Melusine in Lenna's body.
See, that would be a really cool beat, but also it brings to mind the idea of Lenna getting her own Enemy Sprite while possessed so the whole cast is still muppet people but Lenna and just Lenna gets a full high-definition sprite that's twice the size of Faris.
Look I'm just saying, the PC/monster sprite style split is weird.
Fun fact: under most circumstances, Syldra is can actually be more powerful than Bahamut. You can boost Syldra by wielding an Air-aligned weapon, like the Air Knife or the legendary Magus Rod. Bahamut is non-elemental, and can't be boosted.
Yeah, I just ran into a boss fight where the boss - who wasn't even flying! - just ate twice more damage per Syldra cast than from Bahamut, at half the cost. Extremely funny summon, Sylda truly is best girl.
IIRC, the Dawn Warriors are the previous generation, the final four party members are the Light Warriors, with the former being called Dawn because Dawn comes before the Light of day.
They can't be the "Warriors of Light" and "Light Warriors" every single game.
If the game gives me a handy nickname I'll use it. FF1 are the Warriors of Light, FF2 is the Wild Roses, FF3 is the Orpans of Ur, FFIV is *mumble mumble,* FFV is the New Generation of Dawn Warriors.
Monk or a similarly beefy class like Berserker is well worth mastering. Monk is best, for the hp+30% which as I recall gets to go full passive, but also for the highest stamina and strength and the usually helpful auto-counter. If you don't want counter berserker gets slightly less stamina but no counter to inherit and much faster in grinding.
I think I might end up having Monk and Thief mastered on everyone if I even halfway try, which is kind of a bit of a shame, because giving Lenna the best stats and support skills and then slapping a two-handed sword on her was going to be her Thing, but if everyone gets awesome passive stats I might as well level her into a broken endgame combo and I don't think there's enough time in the world for her to catch up to Mystic Knight/Ninja/Ranger if that's the case.
But like, I just ran into two 'enemies' who give out 100 ABP a pop, it seems stupid not to take advantage.
The HP+30% thing doesn't work though sadly. It has to be equipped. I tried having Lenna with HP+30% on or off and it really does change her HP by a full 600 depending on whether it's equipped. Unfortunately it can't really justify itself in comparison to all the other skills I could be equipping.
I want to throttle whoever came up with the Optimize command. I would literally it didn't exist, because if I had to manually slot my weapons I wouldn't do shit like "forget I own the Brave Sword because it's stuck at the bottom of the list and never equips." I genuinely hate this, it's not a minor annoyance, it's an actual aggravation because all the best and most useful gear is stuff I keep not using because the game lies to me and expects me to correct its mistakes. Fuck you.
Yeah, that's fair. It screwed me over quite a few times as a youngster too; it doesn't pay attention to hidden stats, and every time I trusted it, it turned out to be sub-optimal.
I think I might end up having Monk and Thief mastered on everyone if I even halfway try, which is kind of a bit of a shame, because giving Lenna the best stats and support skills and then slapping a two-handed sword on her was going to be her Thing, but if everyone gets awesome passive stats I might as well level her into a broken endgame combo and I don't think there's enough time in the world for her to catch up to Mystic Knight/Ninja/Ranger if that's the case.
But like, I just ran into two 'enemies' who give out 100 ABP a pop, it seems stupid not to take advantage.
The HP+30% thing doesn't work though sadly. It has to be equipped. I tried having Lenna with HP+30% on or off and it really does change her HP by a full 600 depending on whether it's equipped. Unfortunately it can't really justify itself in comparison to all the other skills I could be equipping.
I don't think so. Freelancer Lenna has 1900 HP by default and 2500 HP when I equip HP+30% in one of her ability slots. It's possible that HP+ is already active when not equipped and stacks if you also equip it, but that doesn't jive with her supposedly having Monk's Stamina as a baseline - 1900 is higher than everyone else's HP but not that much higher.
Yeah, unfortunately, Bahamut is kind of useless. In almost every instance, it's going to be outclassed by Sydra when you wield the Air Knife. He hits harder and he is cheaper to cast. Oh, and this isn't the last time something like this is going to happen.
Odin's steal is the Protect Ring. It's not a half bad steal to be honest.
Also, here is a strange fact; remember Melusine? Each of her phases has it's own steal.
She has the entirety of the Leather armour on her if you wan't it. You probably don't though. It's not very good.
I mean, they're Cecil's crew, so they should probably be the Red Wings, right? Maybe Red Wings Mak II, to differentiate from the non-playable members of Cecil's crew?
Although really, "Cecil and friends, as well as random people he enjoys traveling with, and Edge" would also work, and has the benefit of being more clearly descriptive.
Although really, "Cecil and friends, as well as random people he enjoys traveling with, and Edge" would also work, and has the benefit of being more clearly descriptive.
I mean, they're Cecil's crew, so they should probably be the Red Wings, right? Maybe Red Wings Mak II, to differentiate from the non-playable members of Cecil's crew?
Although really, "Cecil and friends, as well as random people he enjoys traveling with, and Edge" would also work, and has the benefit of being more clearly descriptive.
It does get into the interesting feature that Cecil's crew are the first Final Fantasy crew to be bound by neither a metaphysical power or a shared origin. The FFI, III and V crews are all empowered by the crystals, and the FFII crew share a common tragic backstory as orphans from the same tiwn (except for the revolving door extras, who eventually all leave the stage to welcome back Leon). IV is the first time the cast is mostly just people from different walks of life brought together by circumstances - three out of the final five are born in Baron, granted, but they had full individual lived instead of a single trauma event and take time coming together as a party.
I want to throttle whoever came up with the Optimize command. I would literally it didn't exist, because if I had to manually slot my weapons I wouldn't do shit like "forget I own the Brave Sword because it's stuck at the bottom of the list and never equips." I genuinely hate this, it's not a minor annoyance, it's an actual aggravation because all the best and most useful gear is stuff I keep not using because the game lies to me and expects me to correct its mistakes.
I'm pretty sure that if you go to the settings, there should be an option for what happens to your equipment when you change jobs, and you can switch from auto-optimize to clear all.
I am fine with there being some disparity in levels from the happenstance of who levels what. But I'm only just now realizing that Lenna's trek through the Shadow Realm left her two full levels behind the rest of the group, and I just.
I can't accept that. I need to level her back up to par with the others.
It's probably objectively suboptimal to keep the party in line in levels but the OCD is strong and honestly I did the same basic thing of trying to keep the party lockstep.
Lenna is also my tankiest character, with way more HP than everyone else, except lagging two levels behind completely undermines this - she needs to be at parity to be the one with 500 HP over the rest of the party who is still standing after wipes.
What I should have done is keep going until she got one level over the rest of the group for precisely these level magic scenarios, but I am nothing it not profoundly lazy.
Heh, yeah. A few days ago I played through the Ancient Library; my characters were all level 20, and repeatedly got party wiped by lvl5 Death. It's a good thing this version has Quicksave; as it is I just reloaded and eventually one character made it to 21 and not only survived but Learned it.
Cecil's group should be the Twains. Because A) rumors of they're deaths are greatly exaggerated, and B) the only way they could be railroaded any harder was if there were actual tracks.
What I should have done is keep going until she got one level over the rest of the group for precisely these level magic scenarios, but I am nothing it not profoundly lazy.
This just in: "I am actually very lazy", says man who has decided entirely of his own initiative under no pressure or prompting whatsoever to create a full-length in-depth Let's Play of every single Final Fantasy game in order with screenshots and extensive narration included, for free.
Opinions are divided as to the veracity of his delusions claims.
This just in: "I am actually very lazy", says man who has decided entirely of his own initiative under no pressure or prompting whatsoever to create a full-length in-depth Let's Play of every single Final Fantasy game in order with screenshots and extensive narration included, for free.
Opinions are divided as to the veracity of his delusions claims.
This just in: "I am actually very lazy", says man who has decided entirely of his own initiative under no pressure or prompting whatsoever to create a full-length in-depth Let's Play of every single Final Fantasy game in order with screenshots and extensive narration included, for free.
