FF4 Solo Rosa Part I

[sirsystemerror]

(art by kara)

Rosa Farrell is one of Final Fantasy IV's two White Mages. A damsel-in-distress for two portions of the game and Cecil's lover, she is nonetheless quite an interesting character. She also has traits of the series' archer classes, due to her talents with the bow.

White Magic is much like you would expect - a variety of support and healing spells, along with the Holy spell learned very late. Next up is Pray. It has a 50% chance of casting a Cure spell on the party, and a 50% chance of doing nothing at all. This is...not a good command, generally speaking. Later on in the Lunar Ruins, this becomes more useful when it gets upgraded to Miracle via the White Ring. It gets a 50% chance of casting a Cura spell, and a 50% chance of casting Curaga and Esuna in one package. This is a decent command!!

Finally, there's her signature ability - Aim. This command executes a physical attack, but sets the target's evasion to 0, and Rosa's hit rate to 255. This is very important for Rosa in this version of the game, due to the bug with the back row I was talking about. Bows, despite being a back row weapon, will suffer the back row penalty anyway - whether you're on 1.0 or 1.1. 127% against 0 evasion is still essentially a perfect hit rate, fortunately. Really, the only bad thing is that I have to scroll to it each time.


Just showing this picture to show off how the first few scenes aren't programmed to handle having characters besides Cecil showing. It's even more broken if I try to take Rosa into the bedroom scene, and actually softlocks the game!!


Rosa's stats...her Strength isn't half-bad. She's certainly capable of using it. But her limited amount of ammo for this stage of the game and no way to get more arrows until reaching Kaipo, meant she had to run away from more than a few battles.


And indeed. The simple Mist Dragon fight, featured plinking it for 20-25 damage at a time each time. She actually ran out in the middle of this fight, and had to finish them off with her bare hands. Luckily, Hold made this trivial.


Rosa's iffy attack continued into the Kaipo waterway. It took 3-4 arrows to kill even the most basic of enemies for this stage of the game. Not worth fighting. What she had no problem with, however, are these Zombies. Simple healing spells spelled the end of them.

Also, I lied earlier. Pray came in handy when traveling to conserve MP. Even if it was MP Rosa wasn't really using anyway.


Interestingly, the Octomammoth's losing its tentacles is based on the number of hits it takes, rather than the damage it has taken. This meant Rosa would have to deal with a slow (especially after-slow), hard-hitting beast.

This is a good time to talk about the Protect spell. It's pretty simple: each cast increases the user's Defense by 5, up to a maximum of 255. It took several casts of the spell, but eventually, Octomammoth was more or less simply tickling her when it tried to attack.


Rosa picked up upgrades for her weapons in Damcyan, although preferred to save the Arrows until a later period of time when she would be able to make better use out of the presented limited 20-of-them.

Antlion was not one of those times. In order to get the Sand Ruby to cure her own desert fever, Rosa had to deal with this thing's counterattacks. On the SNES version, her Aim would not provoke its counters due to a bug. That's fixed on this version, so she had to plow through its...16 or so damage Counter Horns. No deal at all.


This time, I had a character who didn't have it in them to win before the bombs could start exploding. Rosa cast Hold on one of the Gray Bombs after weakening another, and with that, was able to outlast them.

Rosa busted out the Holy Arrows for the Fabul battle sequence. They were highly effective on the Leshies in particular, due to their getting extra racial damage against Spirits. For some reason, the marines (but not the generals) resist the Holy element, so Rosa switched over to Iron Arrows agianst them.


If you were expecting anything less than complete domination from a white mage heading up the undead heavy Mt. Ordeals, you don't know anything. Rosa's preferred method of attack, however, was her arrows. They gained a racial bonus against the undead/spirits AND an elemental bonus for hitting their holy weakness. Cure spells weren't preferred, due to the Spirits actually being healed by them.

Liliths were the only thing that did not get two-shot by Rosa. They also had a problematic counter in their paralyzing Slaps. Rosa could deal with them by casting Berserk. Although classified as a buff spell as far as targetting is concerned, it's perfectly usable on the enemies.


Scarmiglione part 1, Rosa double cast Slow for maximum effectiveness, then took out three of the Skulnauts before setting on him. In Part 2, he's weak to both Holy and Wind. So Rosa's arrows hurt like hell.

The Baron Guards before Yang threw an unexpected wrench into the plans. Rosa had to go in with status magic to prevent them from countering her attacks with Mini. The Old Waterway beyond was interesting for the Electrofish, who are inexplicably weak to Wind. Rosa's arrows were highly damaging to them.

Nothing fancy about Baigan. Slow before he can get his Reflect up, take out the Left Arm to prevent Entangle, plink away at him until he falls, then survive the Right Arm's explosion.


And back the truck up, it's Cagnazzo. If you've read Sullla's solo Cecil and/or Sofis' solo Kain games, you know full well what he's capable of. Survival wasn't the problem for Rosa. A Cura easily washed away the damage from Tsunami, The problem was outdamaging him when he reached just over 600HP, where he would retract into his shell and began restoring HP, 531 at a time. Her average damage was 130. At least Aim mitigates his increased evasion.

Using Slow/Spider's Silk and a Hermes Sandles didn't help. Rosa was still left unable to do enough damage in enough time to get by. What's a girl to do?


Well, how about this? These Hydras in the Waterway drop Poison Arrows, both as their semi-rare and rare drop. If we get our miracle worker hands on some, we should be able to do more damage and take him out before he can heal! The increased power Poison Arrows bring to the table help; throw in the attack multipliers we'll be getting from the extra levels, and it should be enough.

Fighting the Hydras was somewhat tricky, due to their using Entangle. They could endlessly lock Rosa in a cycle of paralysis. She countered this by using Confuse, which would make them attack themselves. Both resetting their AI pattern and letting her kill them with an arrow from there.


A few levels later, Rosa had an attack multiplier of 6 if she equipped a Twist Headband and Kenpo Gi. The Poison Arrows eventually did drop; they nearly doubled her attack.


And that's all there was to it. After triggering the shell switchover the first time, Rosa threw a couple Spider's Silk at Cagnazzo. She then continued to shoot until Tsunami was doing just over 30 damage - representing his HP. She then switched to the Poison Arrows and let loose.

With the airship come new places and things to see. A new bow - the Great Bow - and three new flavors of arrows - Fire, Ice, and Lightning - were available in Troia. Coming off Edge's game, you should know what the last three are capable of doing for us.


There were two ways to proceed through the Magnetic Cave. The easy way, which consisted of shooting Holy Arrows at most of the opposition (something I actually didn't catch on to until the walk out). And the ~_♥-FUN WAY-♥_~ where she would, for example, throw out Confuse on the likes of those Cait Sith to get them to Blaster their team, and Mini on the Ogres to cripple them


Holy Arrows made a fatal mockery of the Dark Elf and Dark Dragon.

On the way out, Rosa got a Power Armlet drop from an Ogre. This gives +10 to Strength, but sadly, she cannot use it.


These enemies of were particular interest on the way up. Their semi-rare drop is the Rune Staff, which is actually the strongest staff in the game. Good for other white mages. Notsomuch Rosa, who prefered to use her bow.


Rosa had made a trip to Eblan Castle in order to pick up a set of 10 Mute Arrows. She broke them out against the Magus Sisters, taking Cindy out in three and the others out in two.

Barbariccia was rendered completely impotent by protecting against Ray with equipment, protecting against her physicals with Blink, and completely ignoring her high evasion with Aim.


Rosa got off to a slow start with her lowish attack, though has since caught up to some degree. So far, she's proven to be an interesting character, as a friend of mine suggested she would be. I was genuinely surprised that Pray had an actual use, although it did indeed quickly outlive any usefulness. Rosa is permanently in the party from here on out, so this actually features the most "normalcy" outside of Solo Cecil.

Next | Index