Twintania. To answer your question, no he's not what the aqua rings are for. You will know when you will need them
I... have a grudge against Twintania.
First of all, the book wasn't lying when it said he was vulnerable charging Giga Flare. In addition to dropping his defences to 0, he is vulnerable to Death, Petrify, Toad and Stop. How does he do this? Well the game considers both phases of him to be entirely different enemies. And guess what? Each phase has its own steals and drops. The normal phase has a small chance to drop the only Tinklebell in the entire game, and the charge phase has a steal for a Titan's Axe, the only way to get a second one in the game. Fortunately, the Titan's Axe is actually an extremely easy steal to get, but this means that to get all the good stuff, you need to do some damage, wait for the charge phase to appear, steal the axe, find a way to survive Giga Flare (probably by casting Toad) wait for him to return to normal (noticeable when he stops being a toad. Remember; different enemies.) then kill him, and hope he drops the Tinklebell, which is not likely. If he doesn't, you reset and do the whole thing over again. Oh, and the nearest save point was just far away enough that you really begin to notice the distance when you do repeated attempts. Needless to say, I was there for a while.
Twintania. To answer your question, no he's not what the aqua rings are for. You will know when you will need them
I... have a grudge against Twintania.
First of all, the book wasn't lying when it said he was vulnerable charging Giga Flare. In addition to dropping his defences to 0, he is vulnerable to like Death, Petrify, Toad and Stop. How does he do this? Well the game considers both phases of him to be entirely different enemies. And guess what? Each phase has it's own steals and drops. The normal phase has a small chance to drop the only Tinklebell in the entire game, and the charge phase has a steal for a Titan's Axe, the only was to get a second one in the game. Fortunately, the Titan's Axe is actually an extremely easy steal to get, but this means that to get all the good stuff, you need to do some damage, wait for the charge phase to appear, steal the axe, find a way to survive Giga Flare (probably by casting Toad) wait for him to return to normal (noticeable when he stops being a toad. Remember; different enemies.) then kill him, and hope he drops the Tinklebell, which is not likely. If he doesn't, you reset and do the whole thing over again. Needless to say, I was there for a while.
Thank god FFV only has a bestiary and chests completion rate, and not one for getting every piece of equipment in the game. I would absolutely not be able to resist trying to do this myself if it had the latter, and boy would it be a miserable experience.
Could the people who watch the streaming, don't share (or put in spoiler) what happens in the streaming before the Let's Play has been posted, please ?
Because, as Omicron doesn't want to be spoiled about a game, I think it's fair as a reader that I just to wanna learn how he dramatically failed amazingly succeed (of course...) by reading his Let's Play than from someone else.
Well, if Omicron says it's ok that people spoil his Let's Play, I will abide by it though.
I skimmed your VOD; I'm not sure if the microphone volume was too low or if it was something more complicated, but I could barely hear you over the combat music.
Okay okay so that was another wipe. Before I can strategize, what I need to do is check how much HP Omega has and whether it has any weakness other than Lightning (that one being fairly obvious), so I'm going to throw a dummy run at it just to get a Libra off.
OH FUCK YOU.
Okay so I need to play spell badminton just to scan Omega because it's protected by a passive Reflect, fantastic. Eventually I do manage to get that working (after another wipe); whereupon I learn Omega is lv 119 (which is impossible to get for PCs, as everyone else in the game is capped at 99) and has 55,530 HP.
50k is a lot, but it's not insurmontable, so let's get to work on whittling that down with our most potent spells, alright?
What the actual fuck.
Okay so Omega can basically shrug off most magic that makes it past its Reflect. In addition, it has several deadly offensive moves: Delta Attack causes damage and petrifies a single target, Wave Cannon inflicts massive damage plus the sap status effect (progressive health loss over time), Maelstrom reduces everyone to single-digit HP, Blaster either paralyzes a party member or kills them, Atomic Ray deals fire damage to everyone and Flamethrower to a single target, and there are more! Worst of all these moves, however, is Encircle, which does this:
See how Bartz and Lenna are gone from the screen? Yeah, Encircle removes a party member from the battle. This is effectively the same as a KO that cannot be undone. There is no raise possible, no means of retrieving the character over than resetting the battle with Return. It fucking sucks.
Omega also loves counterattacks. When it receives damage, it responds with two moves back to back; Rocket Punch, which causes damage equal to half the target's HP and causes Confusion, then either Rocket Punch again on someone else or Mustard Gas (high damage, inflicts Sap) or Encircle. Omega also reacts to Dualcast and Dual-Wield attacks twice, so for instance dualcasting Bahamut with Faris does pitiful damage and results in me eating two Rocket Punches and two Encircles, at which point half the party is gone, one PC is KO and the last one is Confused and hitting herself, so that's a wipe.
With significant effort, I am eventually able to get Bartz to cast Spellblade (Thundaga) and then deliver a Rapid Fire attack on Omega, with the following results:
Each individual hit deals in the vicinity of 5k damage. Bartz strikes eight times as part of a single Rapid Fire move. This amounts to ~40k damage, which is 15k damage short of killing Omega, so I cannot kill it in one attack - I need either someone else to contribute damage, or for Bartz to attack twice, which with Spellblade is a total of three turns. Now, you might say "but Omi, surely attacking twice in one fight is not an overwhelming task!"
That's where you'd be wrong. Omega isn't just deadly, it is fast as hell. It goes, roughly, three times for each one turn all my characters get - the ATB system allows Omega to effectively have three "turns" per "round," and my characters need to be basically constantly mitigating the sheer damage output it delivers. What's more, Bartz's Rapid Fire is instantly followed by 2+ Rocket Punches and up to two Encircles which do not take up Omega's turn, meaning the return fire has a high chance of wiping the party.
Progressive iterations on my initial basic tactics of "just YOLO it and hope it works" during my streamed attempts with feedback from some viewers lead to a variety of ideas being tried and discarded. Initially, my plan is to have Lenna (who is Two-Handing the Brave Blade with the maximum attack power in the game, and knows Rapid Fire) provide the missing damage component so a Lenna/Bartz tag team move kills Omega. Lenna in Rapid Fire mode deals 2,5k to 3k damage per hit, so 10k to to 15k damage total, which is just enough to kill Omega if I'm lucky.
This is not a good idea, for reasons you can see from this screenshot - by the time I have Lenna attacking, half the party is KO, and Omega is about to deliver return fire in the form of Rocket Punches that will push everyone to low enough HP that by the time Krile's turn and chance to cast Curaga rolls around, we wipe to Atomic Fire.
Eventually, I have to ditch the idea of using Lenna offensively. Omega's counters are just too intense and its action speed too high to make a 'mere' 10k damage worth it. Spells are similarly out the window, as even a Dualcast Flare or Bahamut is pitiful damage compared to the return fire, which always runs the chance of an Encircle making the battle unwinnable.
So I need to shift to a defensive focus. How? Well, I make some early experiments with Shell and Protect, but even Quick and Dualcast only allow me to protect about half the party. I try Carbuncle to see if Reflect works, and it does, but Atomic Fire heals Omega when returned.
Additionally, the Confuse status effect is a major loss cause for me, as it turns my own characters against me and wastes valuable turns even when it doesn't result in stuff like Bartz killing everyone, which does tend to happen.
Here you can see me swapping Krile from Mime to Freelancer to broaden her equipment selection; the Masamune allows her to act immediately at the beginning of battle so she can Haste everyone, while Red Slippers and Rainbow Dress both provide immunity to Confuse. Having both on one character is kind of silly, but it's an early attempt, eventually I spread those around.
I also have two Coral Rings; those grant fire damage immunity, and Flamethrower and Atomic Ray are both fire-type moves, which means I can make sure two characters go through those unharmed… A plan is starting to take shape. I try the Bone Mail at one point, which is effective at being armored and protecting Bartz from Confuse/Petrify, but then when Bartz dies I realize that this makes him impossible to raise and I wipe again, so. Not a great choice of item.
The old "everyone is efficiently trying to buff one character for massive damage" isn't really what's happening there. The pressure is simply too high; I am merely trying to survive and scrape by the finish line with Bartz delivering two Spellblade-boosted Rapid Fires and everyone just kind of being cannon fodder. The important thing is using Red Slippers and Rainbow Dresses to make as many characters as possible immune to Confuse, and then… Forget the Coral Rings, actually; they're only important for Fire immunity and, with advice from chat, I end up deciding to use Carbuncle anyway because it ensures everyone is immune to Atomic Ray, not just two characters. Sure, it means the reflected fire damage heals Omega but, once I get past the knee jerk "I should never let the opponent heal" instinct, it heals for like 1,500 damage, which is nothing. Either Omega takes two Spellblade Rapid Fires, or it doesn't, and some couple thousand HP of healing won't change that.
One thing I will give FFV's superboss: it's not time-consuming. I have, at this point, been battling Omega for over half an hour, which is nothing compared to my time spent on Soulsborne bosses; any given attempt at the big robot lasts two minutes top, even a dozen failed runs take up very little time.
And then it's time. Time to win.
This battle is an absolute disaster. My idea was "Lenna's Rapid Fire isn't worth it because of the volume of counters, but maybe a couple of simple Attacks will still be enough to make up the missing damage so Bartz only needs to hit once!" This is an idea predicated on several mistaken assumptions:
The amount of counters is related to the number of attacks I deliver, so a simple Attack will result in fewer counters than Rapid Fire. This is wrong; Omega hits twice regardless, and four times if I use dual-wield or dualcast, no matter what.
Lenna's simple Attack, thanks to Two-Handing and the Brave Blade, can deal meaningful damage. This is completely wrong; it turns out there is a hidden variable I'm not aware of in the interaction between Rapid Fire and Omega's Defense - a single hit from RF is supposed to do less damage than a full Attack, made up for in sheer numbers, but Lenna's individual RF hits do 2-3k damage, whereas her normal attack does 900. Literally not even 1/55 of Omega's HP, and instantly punished by a flurry of Rocket Punches.
So that's pointless and nearly gets me a TPK, with Encircle taking out Krile - I no longer have a Time/White Mage, so I'm basically fucked. I hasten to throw Bartz and Elixir shortly before Omega's Wave Cannon takes out both Faris and Lenna before Bartz got off a single move. I throw a desperate Spellblade Rapid Fire, dealing massive damage but failing to kill omega; in reply the mech delivers four rocket punches, incrementally halving Bartz's HP four times until he's down to 156, and then Omega takes its actual turn…
…and its move is Blaster, a paralyzing/instakill attack which is also reflectable. Because I used Carbuncle at the start of the fight, it bounces, missing Omega (which is immune to its effect), a millisecond before Bartz gets to take another turn.
Which is all I need for a second Rapid Fire.
That… was… a lot.
Krile removed from battle, Lenna and Faris KO, Bartz managed to pull a last man standing action and get us across the finish line by the skin of our teeth.
But we won, baby.
Our sole reward for this (aside from 100 ABP which are useless to Bartz, the only survivor) is the Omega Badge, which does nothing; it is purely there to testify to our victory against the toughest boss in the entire series so far.
Damn, that was cool.
@Egleris asked if I would consider Omega or the Warmech the first superboss in the series, and I think it has to be Omega. The Warmech is tough, but it's not actually tougher than Chaos, the game's intended final boss, and is not marked by any particular special reward marking it as having unique status. Omega is very much a successor to the Warmech; it is a hyper-advanced war machine in a setting with mostly (but not wholly, as we've seen many times) fantasy aesthetics, it is roaming the dark corridors of an endgame dungeon, it specifically calls out nuclear power in its attacks (Atomic Ray vs Nuke), it is an optional encounter, and it kicks your ass.
But the thing is, I don't think the Warmech was really intended as a deliberate challenge; rather it's a jump scare, a jack in the box. When you're roaming the floors of the Flying Fortress, there is a low but not insignificant chance that you will be jumped by a hideously overpowered Lufenian relic that is going to wipe your party, and when you talk to your friends about it in the pre-Internet era they'll be like "no way!" and try to trigger that encounter themselves and maybe never find it or also get absolutely trounced, and maybe someone will succeed, but, well.
Keep in mind that in FF1 as it was initially released, you would save by using a Tent outside of the Mirage Tower, and then you would have to go first through the Tower, then through the Flying Fortress, reach all the way to Tiamat, defeat her and escape. In this scenario, you do not want to meet the Warmech. In the very likely scenario that your party, already resource-drained by the ambient random encounters, dies, that is potentially several hours of game lost. Any 'run' of the Warmech would take not merely an hour like mine did just pacing across the bridge waiting for the encounter to trigger, but several as every single run has to go through the entire dungeon first. I am sure people did hunt the Warmech for the challenge, but I don't think it was designed for that purpose.
The Warmech, I would say, is the proto-superboss. The basic shape of the idea, not yet fully formed, not yet fully realized as an actual superboss, which would go untouched for the next three games (and then retroactively injected into each game by the remakes' extra dungeons). FFI has nothing like it, FFIII has a kind of superdungeon in the form of Eureka but its difficulty is brought on by the sheer number of bosses rather than any one of them being individually strong and it is also all but mandatory for the endgame rather than optional (need those special jobs and weapons for the World of Darkness), FFIV just has the legendary weapons chest defended by strong, but not remarkably strong bosses and Bahamut as an optional "tough fight with a strong reward" that is still of merely fair difficulty. It is only with FFV that the original idea behind the Warmech finally blooms into its full potential as the true incarnation of the "superboss" concept.
And hoo boy what an incarnation it is.
I know people laugh at my getting hit by a freight train encountering Omega, and it is funny, but I want to emphasize that I love this. I feast on this. I have been waiting for the past, what, five hours of game time for the game to finally challenge me again, to raise the stakes and force me to actually use my overpowered endgame toolkit to its fullest extent, and it has finally delivered. This was fun and exciting, even (especially?) if Omega's toolkit is absolute bullshit, because frankly, so are my characters.
Could I defeat Omega without Thundaga Spellblade Dual-Wielding Rapid Fire, a phrase that makes me vaguely ashamed to type? Maybe. I'm not sure. There are perhaps other jobs that might have better defensive abilities allowing them to draw out the fight and survive, but Encircle is a flat "fuck you" that bypasses all combat consideration and cripples the party for the rest of the fight with no recourse. According to chat, Chemist has a Mix combo that grants immunity to Encircle - that is the only way I can realistically imagine tackling Omega without the wombo combo. Having checked the wiki after the fight, a party of three Bards using the Stop song and a Mystic knight doing the wombo combo allegedly makes the fight easy, although that seems cheap. Zeninage would probably perform well in this fight, as it does in pretty much everything else.
I might try this fight again without Freelancer/Mimic, to try and see if a party of "normal jobs" (with bonus skills from mastered jobs to customize them), to see if I can pull it off. Not now, though; I am eager to finish the game. And also to find and fight Shinryu, which I am already aware is present in this game as its second optional superboss, though many people seem to consider it weaker than Omega.
There is, ultimately, only one real criticism I have to make of Omega, and it's that…
…it literally uses the exact same sprite as the "Mecha Head" random encounter from the Pyramid of Moore.
Like, seriously? The strongest boss in the franchise up to this point, and you couldn't splurge on an original sprite for it? It's baffling. I mean it does open some interesting theorycrafting options (the Mecha Heads have two attacks in common with Omega, Mustard Bomb and Flamethrower), but it's still kind of a letdown.
As for Omega's origin, nature, and role in the story, there is very little we know. Beyond the mech lies a small area which is a mirror of the Library of the Ancients, and it does contain tantalizing lore, but only crumbs thereof:
Three lines, that's all we get - although this also reflects an in-setting mystery; even the people of ancient times did not know the nature or purpose of Omega, because it is an alien robot from space. It was also directly followed by the dragon Shinryu, implying some connection between the two (FFXIV would eventually make much of the link between Omega and dragons in general, although its handling of the Shinryu connection specifically is… well, I have strong opinions about it, let's just say).
So if Omega came from space, and the Mecha Heads are plentiful, patrolling the corridors of the Pyramid, and using weaker, degraded version of some of its abilities, could it be that Ronkan technology was directly inspired by Omega? They created weaker replicas as part of studying the original machine, or whatever memory they retained from it.
Yes… I think I like this. A hyper-advanced war machine arrives from space, likely intent on destroying much of the world for reasons unknown, and after it is found that even the weapons which slew Enuo, the greatest evil the world had even known, cannot kill it, it was sealed within the Rift in desperation - but for its limited existence it would have a massive impact on world history by providing the technological basis and inspiration that would launch Ronka to superpower status, converting its ancient temples into flying stations bristling with guns. Hey, you know who has the same Wave Cannon attack as Omega? The Soul Cannon protecting the Ronkan Ruins.
Yeah, I think this all fits together. I like it.
And of note - Omega does not answer to Exdeath. It does not appear among the demons it talks to during his big monologue, it is not seen taking orders from him, it is most likely more powerful than him, this thing is a free agent, left in isolation within the Rift and never approached by Exdeath because it is, most likely, too dangerous to risk using for his own end, if that is even possible at all given its hostile intent and lack of a perceivable personality that could be interacted with and negotiated.
Even the final boss is scared of this thing.
Alright. Omega has been dealt with. I guess we might as well push forward some. As mentioned, directly behind Omega is a library area, which contains a haunted book:
Apanda is a palette swap of Byblos, and likely some kind of relative to him, as according to the wiki it shares a similar fear of Ifrit. A neat quirk but not one that's relevant to us, as just having Bartz use Spellblade Flare and Rapid Fire annihilates the beast in short order.
One of the books is the lore about Omega and Shinryu, and the other is about "the secret of Gigaflare," warning us of a new evolution in the Flare genre likely to be used by some upcoming boss which is incredibly deadly but requires charge up time during which the boss is vulnerable. Cool!
Interacting with the book causes the room to shake, whereupon exiting through the same door we came in from leads us to this strange aerial pathway instead of the caves:
Check out the moth-eaten edges and the purple outlines. I think this is, like… a place existing in a weird state of dimensional overlap, like it's here but also elsewhere, right? Making our way across it leads us to the gates of a floating castle:
Which leads us to a dungeon inside the dungeon; the Interdimensional Rift is without a doubt the most ambitious dungeon featured in the series so far, constantly swapping aesthetics and involving nested dungeons with multiple enemy categories - although right now, the encounter roster is just more Samurai/Ninja/Monk/Dancer palette swaps.
Down into the guts of the castle, we find the, well, 'dungeons' in the proper sense of the term, as in jail, with a bunch of people locked in cages. Any hope that we might have found some sympathetic allies trapped long ago in the Void are soon squashed, however:
So, remember how I've noted that some of the late game encounters are basically just throwing our jobs at us? So we have Ninjas that dual wield, Iron Fists that can use Focus, Dancers with status effect moves, and so on? Azulmagia is a Blue Mage boss. He uses a wide array of Blue Magic, and perhaps even more interestingly, he can learn Blue Magic - if you use certain Blue Magic spells against him, he will immediately add it to his repertoire and use it against us. This opens up some interesting loopholes (you can 'teach him' Self-Destruct) but, well.
Look, we beat Omega, none of these posers quite rate.
Fun fact though: so, earlier I mused about how I assumed some of the rift demons were probably among the "best of" boss compilations added in remakes like those Dawn of Souls dungeons that include a selection of bosses from other games? Well, I don't know about the other games in the series, but for FFXIV's Omega Raids specifically, we're just about to hit the streak of 3 out of 4 bosses used in its FFV homage, Deltascape v1 to v3, and the odd surprise is, the first one isn't even a boss in this game.
See these old dudes? Just like Azulmagia, they are more than meet the eye. Interacting with them triggers a fight, which at first seems to be against some old wizard type of guy, until they transform:
"Alte Roite,"/"Jura Aevis," a palette swap of the Archeoaevis from the Ronkan Ruins. It uses basic elemental spells and dies quickly to my Rapid Fire. I guess technically it qualifies as a boss, having the immunities of one, even though there are six of these old dudes who guard the chests in these jail cells? But it doesn't really feel that way.
Also, it's time for another iteration of… The Etymology Corner!
What kind of a name is 'Alte Roite'? Well, it doesn't really mean anything… probably because it's a phonetic transcription of Alte Leute, German for "old people." So this old guy's name when you fight it is literally just 'old guy' up until he reveals his true form as a feathered serpent, which is objectively pretty funny. Sadly that context is wholly lost in FFXIV, where Alte Roite appears in its serpent form to begin with.
I just thought it was funny.
Anyway, beating up the old geezers frees up the way to the stairs out of the dungeon, but before we can get there, we are ambushed by another of the rift demons, who drives the whole party up against a wall at high speed before triggering its fight!
And that's our second Deltascape boss right there.
Amusing to see another iteration on the "copyright-free Beholder" idea these games have been dragging for a while now. This one has the single eye, spherical body and stalks/tendrils, but it lacks the extra eyes on said eyestalks or the mouth, and it doesn't appear to be floating. Really it feels more like a kind of germinated tuber than anything. Which makes a weird kinda sense, seeing as its attacks are earth-typed? It can use Earth Shaker to damage the party or Demon Eye to petrify individual characters. Not knowing this in advance and not thinking to adapt and use Float in the middle of battle leads to this embarrassing outcome:
I do defeat Catastrophe, but it's a scuffed as hell run in which I lose both of my physical attackers to his earthquake attacks and have to finish it with Flare. Not pretty, and a useful lesson: even with my overpowered Omega Slayer party, I am still vulnerable to getting sloppy.
Once the beast has been slain, however, we finally make the acquaintance of a friendly NPC who was trapped in this dungeon this whole time!
Well, women making the moves on Final Fantasy PCs have a 100% track record of not turning out to be monsters in disguise, so this isn't suspicious at all.
We take the stairs and head back upstairs, where we find the castle's throne room - only upon attempting to exit through the back, some unknown force pulls us back and onto the throne, where a suspicious voice chides us.
There are actually a few minutes between the smooch and the "twist" reveal that this was actually a trap so it's not that sudden, but it's just spent walking through corridors and fighting random encounters so it's hard to render the effect in text form.
…
Okay first, let's talk mechanics. Halicarnassus opens the fight by casting Toad on everyone, only the various immunity gear equipped on most of my characters mean only two of them actually get toadified. I have Bartz self-buff with Flare Spellblade, Lenna use a Maiden's Kiss on Krile, and Faris cast Toad on herself, and upon turn 2 rolling around Bartz and Lenna both Rapid Fire and that's the fight.
…
At some point I'm gonna have to do a Study of Gender in FFV or something.
No, like - if you've watched me stream this section, you'll note that I was referring to Halicarnassus as "she/her;" that's because in FFXIV, Halicarnassus is pretty clearly presenting as a female demon. In FFV, judging from the sprite, concept art, and wiki, Halicarnassus is; presumably, a dude. Who shapeshifts into a woman to entice adventurers into a kiss? And who looks highly androgynous in their demon form - they're basically Femto from Berserk? I don't know; man. "Man [who is a literal demon] disguises himself as a woman to act seductive towards another man" has some seriously Bad Vibes and some real bad history. On the other hand, "shapeshifting genderfuck creature messes with protagonists for their own amusement" is a fun vibe, like, everyone loves Double Trouble from She-Ra, yeah?
Man my big conclusion post about this game is gonna have The Faris Chapter, that's gonna be fun.
Amano's concept art of FFV Halicarnassus vs FFXIV's design of Halicarnassus, in the same pose and outfit. This could pretty much be a transition timeline.
The Etymology Corner!
Halicarnassus is an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey famous for its mausoleum (which is actually where we get the word 'mausoleum'). I have no idea why that boss is named this way, and it gets even weirder when the later game makes them (presumably?) female.
Alright, that's Halicarnassus dealt with, the third of the Deltascape bosses. What's next? Well, we finally come out of the dungeons to the rooftop of the castle…
Twintania is also a name reused in FFXIV, although that is where the similarities end.
I am starting to come around to this whole romp through a series of cool demons that are coming to us one by one and that we just tear through with overwhelming force. It has some real anime finale energy. FFI and FFIV both had solid "iconic dark general casts" between the Four Fiends and the Elemental Lords (while II and III were just sadface), but those were carefully disseminated throughout the game. This is something I complained about with V, but here, the game just grabbing a dozen of unique bosses and throwing them in a singular gauntlet as we run through the final dungeon is very…
It's giving me Saint Seiya Zodiac Temples energy, honestly. Or Bleach Soul Society. Or One Piece Enies Lobby. If FFV were an anime, I am pretty sure each party member would split and pair off against one opponent while the rest go forward until they each have one foe and then move to another one after defeating them.
…which probably means Faris would be fighting Halicarnassus, which would have good odds for being the most problematic battle in a 200 episode runtime. On the other hand it could lead to an awakening in the audience 🤔
Okay wait I'm getting distracted. So, Twintania.
…in Magic: the Gathering, there is a strategy that is called "Good Stuff." It's when, instead of building your deck around "elf tribal synergies," or "control," or "forcing the opponent to discard," or "cheap aggro," you just stuff your deck full of The Strongest Cards and then just play them and win. Because such a strategy lacks coherency or an overarching theme and yet still wins most of its fight, this is called "Good Stuff." You just grab the good cards and play them all.
That's Twintania. It just has all the strongest attacks featured in the game so far, Leviathan's Tidal Wave, Omega's Atomic Ray, Bahamut's Mega Flare, throws in some Mind Blast as well… Oh and several of those are counters; it has a 33% chance of responding to physical attacks with Tidal Wave and magical attacks with Mega Flare, which is pretty brutal.
Earlier I said because most battles had grown so easy, I got sloppy. I stopped being on the ball with regards to buffs, healing, and so on, because there was no easy to. Twintania is going to be my wakeup call, because by the time I realize it actually hits quite fucking hard, this is happening:
She's charging up Gigaflare, the spell the book warned me against, but I let all my party get wiped out, and now there's only Bartz left standing to take advantage of her weakness. I have one moment to make a choice - try to land in one more attack to kill Titania, or throw a Phoenix Down at one of my healers and hope Twintania's charge up time is long enough that said healer has time to act before Gigaflare?
I, of course, make the wrong choice.
Cool fucking attack animation though, not gonna lie.
Aaaaand that's a wipe, obviously. Gigaflare deals 3k+ damage and would have wiped a full health party. I simply made the wrong tactical choice period; Bartz's Rapid Fire would likely have ended the fight.
But it's no major obstacle. A quick refitting sees Bartz and Lenna equipped with Coral Rings, ensuring that Twintania's multiple Tidal Wave attacks directly heal them and that Atomic Ray deals 0 damage. Its rapid counters and overwhelming attacks still take out Faris and Krile, but too many of its randomized attacks deal no damage for Bartz and Lenna to truly be in danger, and in the end a quick Phoenix Down thrown in at the last second to carry Faris over the finish line and a Rapid Fire attack later…
Twintania has fallen before it had a chance to show off Gigaflare again, and with this, Faris has mastered Monk, allowing her to swap back to Mime with the maximum HP available, and a stairways unfolds down from the castle tower to lead us to a warp pad.
We have entered the Void.
Wow, this was quite a bit longer to write out than my usual updates!
I have complicated feelings towards the endgame and I think the key is that it's more fun to talk about as part of the LP than to play through. Playing through it, the endless meaningless random encounters that no longer pose any threat but are still clogging up my runtime are just annoying to go through, the bosses have been so far outmatched that it's more interesting looking up what they do on the wiki than it is fighting them (because I annihilate them while ignoring their mechanics), and all in all it makes me realize Pokémon's Repel item was one of the best inventions ever conjured in the field of old-school JRPGs.
But writing about it, going over the various environments within the Rift, what each boss can do, what their presentation says about them, and so on, is more fun, to the point of almost making me forget that I was autobattling through everything praying for random monk opponents to stop wasting my time. And as much as they don't really have much of a personality, the demons of the rift are each individually recognizable as having a cool design and gimmick.
So, all in all, mixed feelings, I guess?
But Omega was one of the coolest moments in the series so far and I'm excited for Shinryu, assuming I haven't missed him somehow already.
Okay so Omega can basically shrug off most magic that makes it past its Reflect. In addition, it has several deadly offensive moves: Delta Attack causes damage and petrifies a single target, Wave Cannon inflicts massive damage plus the sap status effect (progressive health loss over time), Maelstrom reduces everyone to single-digit HP, Blaster either paralyzes a party member or kills them, Atomic Ray deals fire damage to everyone and Flamethrower to a single target, and there are more! Worst of all these moves, however, is Encircle, which does this:
Azulmagia is particularly helpful because he knows something like two thirds the Blue Magic spellbook, and you can still learn those spells from him if you haven't yet.
Its not a fight, its scholars of blue magic trading techniques. He teaches the party an entire spellbook of useful techniques, they teach him how to cast Suicide Bomber.
It's giving me Saint Seiya Zodiac Temples energy, honestly. Or Bleach Soul Society. Or One Piece Enies Lobby. If FFV were an anime, I am pretty sure each party member would split and pair off against one opponent while the rest go forward until they each have one foe and then move to another one after defeating them.
Hali is also interesting from a mecha back perspective as their attack sequence is always the same 8 action long one so you can for example old reflect their attack with holy back at them.
Also I am unsure but aren't all users of toad/ribbit encountered in this game female ?
So, remember how I've noted that some of the late game encounters are basically just throwing our jobs at us? So we have Ninjas that dual wield, Iron Fists that can use Focus, Dancers with status effect moves, and so on? Azulmagia is a Blue Mage boss. He uses a wide array of Blue Magic, and perhaps even more interestingly, he can learn Blue Magic - if you use certain Blue Magic spells against him, he will immediately add it to his repertoire and use it against us. This opens up some interesting loopholes (you can 'teach him' Self-Destruct) but, well.
At least it's not surprise Zombie>Raise. Though Encircle comes close. And yeah. at a certain point you got enough power to cut through most bosses. It's the bosses in mooks skin that can cause trouble.
Interesting to see that. I feel like games using this system usually are hesitant to actually make it that impactful.
The closest equivalent that comes to mind is actually Octopath, which while being simply turn-based usually gives fancy boss-enemies multiple 'turns' per turn. Often they even have them gain more turns as the battle ramps which due to the UI prominently showing that information provides a nice visual 'Oh Shit'.
it turns out there is a hidden variable I'm not aware of in the interaction between Rapid Fire and Omega's Defense - a single hit from RF is supposed to do less damage than a full Attack
Its not a fight, its scholars of blue magic trading techniques. He teaches the party an entire spellbook of useful techniques, they teach him how to cast Suicide Bomber.
Literally. "Azulmagia" means "blue magic" in Spanish, just without a space in the middle (and in Spanish one would very rarely one put an adjective before the word it connects to).
Worth noting that Dissidia repurposed this particular area as the arena for FFV's characters, if you wanted to check what the 3d version of that area would probably look like. I loved that arena, it was a lot of fun fighting there.
The FFIV arena, of course, has you fighting on the Moon. As is only proper.
If you never got Ramuh before the void sucked the place he was in up, you would have found him in this castle.
Welcome to the best place to grind job classes. None of the enemies give a scrap of exp, but they all give an absolute ton of AP. This is probably where you will be finishing you're jobs off.
That said, I would advise you to wait for the room with the ad boss I mentioned. There is a special encounter there.
Worth noting that Dissidia repurposed this particular area as the arena for FFV's characters, if you wanted to check what the 3d version of that area would probably look like. I loved that arena, it was a lot of fun fighting there.
The FFIV arena, of course, has you fighting on the Moon. As is only proper.
IIRC XIV reused (or slightly modified) the model from a later Dissidia game for those "Omega makes you fight simulations of FFV bosses" fights Omicron mentioned.
Probably Dissidia 2015; it came out around the same time as the Omega raids (circa Stormblood).
Amano's concept art of FFV Halicarnassus vs FFXIV's design of Halicarnassus, in the same pose and outfit. This could pretty much be a transition timeline.
…in Magic: the Gathering, there is a strategy that is called "Good Stuff." It's when, instead of building your deck around "elf tribal synergies," or "control," or "forcing the opponent to discard," or "cheap aggro," you just stuff your deck full of The Strongest Cards and then just play them and win. Because such a strategy lacks coherency or an overarching theme and yet still wins most of its fight, this is called "Good Stuff." You just grab the good cards and play them all.
Good Stuff is a very common archtype in Limited, on the basis that frequently you can't get enough of any particular things to really commit to a coherent strategy. But it does limit your ability to use the best Limited strategy of all time the noble flunge.
Given the various abilities creatures have and the possibility of combat tricks, figuring out if it's safe to attack, or if you have lethal on the board can be quite difficult. Flunge resolves this issue decisively. Turn all your dudes sideways. What are you, some kind of sucker who does Maths? Leave that nonsense for your opponent, let their brains overheat as they try and work out the correct blocks. This message sponsored by the Gruul Clans.
I have complicated feelings towards the endgame and I think the key is that it's more fun to talk about as part of the LP than to play through. Playing through it, the endless meaningless random encounters that no longer pose any threat but are still clogging up my runtime are just annoying to go through, the bosses have been so far outmatched that it's more interesting looking up what they do on the wiki than it is fighting them (because I annihilate them while ignoring their mechanics), and all in all it makes me realize Pokémon's Repel item was one of the best inventions ever conjured in the field of old-school JRPGs.
This is a section that I find can only work with a lot of grinding or a lot of savestates. Besides all the random encounters mentioned by Omicron Pretty much all of the bosses in this section have at least one way to say "fuck you" to the player, more if you are Not Omicron levels of grinding beforehand, and more importantly from a game design perspective, a lot of them are untelegraphed cheapshots. Like, the only one I could consider that the majority of players would see coming is Halicarnassus (and Omega), and that's outmatched by the two complete cheapshots of "beat boss to have way open up, surprise it's a second boss fight" in Catastrophe and Twintania.
The save points in the original are nowhere near well spaced or frequent enough to make up for it. And then the cherry on top of the cake is that, assuming you are not doing Omicron levels of grinding and prep, you're doing the Omega Shuffle before this gauntlet. I think this is the 2nd worst endgame in the series behind FFIII and I'm not sure it gets particularly close.
Ironically, FFVIII is the one game where having "no encounters" active in certain parts of the game actively detracts from the experience, making the game more boring. There are definitely areas where it actually enhance the experience (the final dungeon, for one), but FFVIII has what I think is either the best or second best monster roster in the series (as with most things Final Fantasy, FFIX is the other contender), with monster who are actually mostly unique and almost all with a certain "personality" to them, or as much of one as can be expressed via gameplay, and the specific monster distribution in many areas being narratively meaningful as a result. Which means that, in some places, having no encounters makes the game worse.
That's really always the trade-off with "no encounter" abilities in a game with random encounters; too many, too boring, too repetitive, too easy encounters can ruin the atmosphere of a dungeon and make a game not fun, but the right encounters in the right amounts can enhance it. And sometimes the right amount is "none", yes. It's just tricky to strike the right balance.
Ironically, FFVIII is the one game where having "no encounters" active in certain parts of the game actively detracts from the experience, making the game more boring. There are definitely areas where it actually enhance the experience (the final dungeon, for one), but FFVIII has what I think is either the best or second best monster roster in the series (as with most things Final Fantasy, FFIX is the other contender), with monster who are actually mostly unique and almost all with a certain "personality" to them, or as much of one as can be expressed via gameplay, and the specific monster distribution in many areas being narratively meaningful as a result. Which means that, in some places, having no encounters makes the game worse.
The monster design is great, no doubt, but then the levelling systems comes in to screw you in FF8, so that balances it the other way.
Although FF8 also has Encounter-Half (Which is a 75% reduction because shut up), so you can still have some battles whilst reducing the slog, if you prefer.
And of note - Omega does not answer to Exdeath. It does not appear among the demons it talks to during his big monologue, it is not seen taking orders from him, it is most likely more powerful than him, this thing is a free agent, left in isolation within the Rift and never approached by Exdeath because it is, most likely, too dangerous to risk using for his own end, if that is even possible at all given its hostile intent and lack of a perceivable personality that could be interacted with and negotiated.
Makes me wonder what a scare it would be to the player if Exdeath did try to use Omega somehow, like just kicking it out of the Rift into the real world and now you've got it running around as a potential encounter.
That said, congrats on beating Omega! Still have to go back and do that myself, actually, I just pushed ahead for now. Honestly I am... probably just going to throw sing on Lenna and try to Stop it long enough for Faris to spellblade the shit out of it.
Apanda is a palette swap of Byblos, and likely some kind of relative to him, as according to the wiki it shares a similar fear of Ifrit. A neat quirk but not one that's relevant to us, as just having Bartz use Spellblade Flare and Rapid Fire annihilates the beast in short order.
Yup, if you summon ifrit he starts crying and actually turns his back on the fight, and needs to take a turn to psyche himself back up and turn around. Doubly hilariously, iirc in some versions of the game you can then cast berserk on him and he can't turn back around and fight, because that's a command other than attack
So, remember how I've noted that some of the late game encounters are basically just throwing our jobs at us? So we have Ninjas that dual wield, Iron Fists that can use Focus, Dancers with status effect moves, and so on? Azulmagia is a Blue Mage boss. He uses a wide array of Blue Magic, and perhaps even more interestingly, he can learn Blue Magic - if you use certain Blue Magic spells against him, he will immediately add it to his repertoire and use it against us. This opens up some interesting loopholes (you can 'teach him' Self-Destruct) but, well.
You would think some ancient sealed away scholar of magic would like... be a bit smarter than going "hm that guy literally just blew themselves up in my face, I should do that back!" But nope, any blue magic you teach him he starts having a 2 out of 3 chance of casting the next few turns. At least it's a pretty hilarious cheese.
It's giving me Saint Seiya Zodiac Temples energy, honestly. Or Bleach Soul Society. Or One Piece Enies Lobby. If FFV were an anime, I am pretty sure each party member would split and pair off against one opponent while the rest go forward until they each have one foe and then move to another one after defeating them.
I again wonder where exactly Omega would fit in such a lineup. Is it like, the sealed away ancient member in the basement even the villans say "whoa heroes don't go that way, we REALLY don't want that guy to wake up"?
Azulmagia is particularly helpful because he knows something like two thirds the Blue Magic spellbook, and you can still learn those spells from him if you haven't yet.
Its not a fight, its scholars of blue magic trading techniques. He teaches the party an entire spellbook of useful techniques, they teach him how to cast Suicide Bomber.
Azulmagia is also pretty notable because outside of Omega, I think he's the only optional boss in Exdeath's lineup? Yeah you probably want to fight him because he drops a save point and otherwise you'll have to trudge from Omega all the way to the end of the rift for one, but he's just kind of chilling in one of the cells. Even seems like a pretty swell dude because rather than attack you outright, he asks "yo are you the crystal bearers?" And if you say no, just lets you go.
The closest equivalent that comes to mind is actually Octopath, which while being simply turn-based usually gives fancy boss-enemies multiple 'turns' per turn. Often they even have them gain more turns as the battle ramps which due to the UI prominently showing that information provides a nice visual 'Oh Shit'.
"Give the boss multiple turns" tends to be a common counter to the party outnumbering them in a lot of turn based RPGs as time goes on. Like I can't recall if the Remaster version of FFIII does it, but most bosses and some lategame enemies in the DS version get two moves per turn. And in a different vein kind of adjacent to FFV since it also has a cool mix and match job system, Bravely Default has the Brave/Default system where you can basically cash in your future turns to move up to 4 times at once or stock extra turns by defending... but bosses can also do this and will occasionally take full advantage of it for deadly combos.
The save points in the original are nowhere near well spaced or frequent enough to make up for it. And then the cherry on top of the cake is that, assuming you are not doing Omicron levels of grinding and prep, you're doing the Omega Shuffle before this gauntlet. I think this is the 2nd worst endgame in the series behind FFIII and I'm not sure it gets particularly close.
Wait, are there less Save Points in the original or something? In the remaster at least it's one at the falls just before Omega (so even if you bump into it you only lose like 10 seconds), one from Azulmagia (optional, but both a straight shot from the previous one with only two bosses one of which can be trivialized with a mandatory summon), and from there you can easily retreat to that save after each boss in the castle to recharge.
Of course I just abused quicksave/autosave instead, but it doesn't seem that awful?
