FF1 Solo Monk PSP Part IV

So here's the Undead Castle and the Rune Axe I wanted. This is a pretty weird floor, the soldiers variably reiterating their loyalty to their country or, more commonly, being horrified at it - some even outright asking you to kill them. They're all Revenants (weak SoC zombies). Some, even those that wanted to die, took one look at Sofia and peaced out. The King himself is pretty gung-ho (a Pharaoh), and the Queen (a Devil Wizard) is bound to him through love.

Things finally start to pick up random encounter wise in the final few floors of Whisperwind Cove. The enemies there were actually somewhat damaging! Nothing a few Hi-Potions here and there couldn't fix, but still. Of course weaklings were still around, including Knockers - Goblin type enemies with a bunch of HP and no strength to show for it. Some of the game's random encounters can only be found in certain areas in these last few floors - such as the Flare Gigas in a volcano area, or the Bloody Eye in a Flying Fortress area. Makes completing the bestiary kind of a pain!!


Death Gaze is the final boss of Whisperwind Cove, and statistically, it is almost as powerful as Shinryu and Omega. It has a brutal physical attack, insanely high defense, and 30000HP to chew through. Of course this bad boy can also use death spells, compounded by Dispel to make one vulnerable to them should it land, but the overwhelming threat are the physical attacks. My Knight didn't have a problem with his defenses, but Sofia had a mere 50 - and putting on equipment didn't help at all.

This was an extremely difficult battle for Sofia. She could not survive two of Death Gaze's physical strikes, and he loved to use them. To succeed, she needed to open not with the Defender, but actually a Protect Drink. Just one of these was enough to make it possible to survive two strikes, giving her time to use an X-Potion. She repeated this a few times until she had enough HP to safely use the Defender. She followed it up with a Light Curtain to guard against the death moves. Yet even with maxed evasion, Death Gaze could still get attacks through. Sofia occasionally had to make use of the shiny new Rune Axe to cast Curaga on herself.


She followed this up by buffing herself to the moon. Speed Drinks, Giant's Gauntlets, a few Power Drinks...the end result of this was massive overkill damage that killed this guy in three hits. And as I'm showing off here, the cool thing about this remake is that damage is limited only by how much you can do. There's no arbitrary limit based on number of digits. In other words, you just go to overflow.

There's a double reward for this fight. Death Gaze himself drops the Lightbringer, a sword exclusively for Red Wizards. It casts Holy when used as a weapon, but Sofia still had that Judgment Staff from Atomos to sling the stronger Flare instead. Furthermore in a chest is the Ultima Weapon, though it's one-time only. It can be equipped by any promoted class and has an attack value equal to a tenth of the wielder's current HP rounded down. Sofia's fists outclassed it due to getting double hits, but it's by far the strongest weapon for all other classes in the GBA version, outclassing the Masamune unless the user's HP is 559 or lower.


With this out of the way, all that was left was to go through Lifespring Grotto two more times to knock off the FF5 superbosses. I probably should've leveled Sofia to 99 before taking on Shinryu. He had the worst habit of casting Flare twice in a row. Since it often did more than half of her health, this was usually fatal.

The strategy was to start off with a Light Curtain, then use an X-Potion. Follow this up with alternating Defender use and X-Potions until she gets up to max. From there, Sofia used Rune Axe to heal as necessary while buffing up. The first time I got going, it came to a crashing halt because of double Flare. He tried to do it again on my winning run, but Sofia just barely survived it. She did have to use quite a few of her items that restored all HP, but with the Phantom Train wall not an issue anymore, gathering more was always on the table.

There is another double reward here. The Ragnarok is a fine sword that casts Flare when used as an item. It grants various stat bonuses and has only a point of power less than the Masamune, slightly outclassing it due to the strength bonus, as long as it isn't maxed and accuracy is 255 anyway. The Hero's Shield is also in a nearby chest after defeating him. It's essentially Aegis Shield on crack: the same 16 defense, except it acts like a Ribbon, and even gives 40 evasion! Exclusive to Knights and Ninjas only, though.


In fact, I decided to go ahead and get her to 99 before Omega, using the Blue Dragon because it's easier to access and gives just a bit more EXP than the Evil Eye. I made sure Sofia got a stamina bonuses each level up. I also made sure she got strength bonuses each time as well. Finally, I had her most of her stat potions. What the Plus potions do is randomly increase their stat by 1-3. I naturally made sure Sofia got a boost of three each time. She was able to max her stamina this way, although she'll need at least three more Power Pluses to max her strength.

For this last pass of Lifespring Grotto, I wanted to see Shimmering Walkways on B9 or B13, which would give Sofia two items to restore all her HP and a Power Plus. Took a bit, but it was certainly going to be worth it.

The extra magic defense indeed would've made a difference against Shinryu, by the way. He couldn't one-two Sofia with Flare anymore.


Omega also has a brutally strong physical, although seems more reluctant to use it than other annoyances. When Sofia attacked normally after just using Hermes Shoes, she could do around 3000 damage. If I took the time to buff her all the way to the roof, she could hit 10000 damage against Omega! The flip side of buffing offensely is, the time you spend doing that could be more efficiently spent on simply attacking. Hermes Shoes are certainly worth it every time, though. Once the defensive buffs were up though, Sofia could easily heal with the Rune Axe, for around 380 each time with her Intelligence.

And that's Soul of Chaos completed! There's nothing more for Sofia to have here, aside from a couple extra Power Pluses to max her Strength. Even if I wasn't having her equip nothing, her natural defenses easily trump her anything she could find in there to equip.

So I went ahead and got the necessary Power Pluses from Whisperwind Cove. Specifically I wanted to spawn Undead Castle on B6 (1/64 odds), because there would be a Mind Plus for bonus healing and a Megalixir for an extra full healing item there. Nevertheless, I found it on B2 twice - which I accepted because it still gives a Mind Plus and Elixir. I could have Sofia die to the King or Typhon, depending on what was coming up next. The others could be killed off outside by Ochus, who won't run away. She ended up with a total of 148 attack naturally.


Next up is the bonus dungeon found in the PSP version on, the Labyrinth of Time in the back of the Old Chaos Shrine. How this place works is that you speak with the Light of Time (a violet orb) at the start of each area, and choose several abilities to "sacrifice" to gain time to complete the puzzles within each of the various floors you'll go through. If you run out of time, a thick fog creeps in that starts sucking away your HP and MP out of battle, and random battles start harassing you during the puzzle. Completing the puzzle when time has run out unlocks the "red seal", and completing it before that unlocks the blue one. These can lead to different areas and weaker/stronger forms of the final boss.

The abilities you can sacrifice include commands (Fight/Magic/Item/Flee), specific subsets of Magic/Item (can't be combined with each other or the actual command), the ability to dash (bad idea most of the time), or halving a stat temporarily. The good news - for solos at least - is that this dungeon and the timer is balanced around your overall level. Level 99 parties get much less time and need to sacrifice more abilities to get more time. Sofia, with her identical twin brother and those two dead Ninjas around, received a lot more time to work with per ability sacrificed. She could generally get away with just sacrificing the Magic command and Intelligence if available.


This...this is not a good extra dungeon. Some of the puzzles aren't too demanding, like a simple block puzzle or something as reasonable as this - you get similar messages if it isn't where you dug. Others seem like they were trying to make Catcher Chocobo in FF10 look tolerable. All of them have the volcano theme as their background music. Hope you like it as much as the guy who designed this place and decided it should be the version that gets into Theatrhythm rather than the original. I certainly don't. Takes away the slight mystique of the original and replaces with bouncy xylophones. It's sad how my favorite remix is the WSC version. It's pretty faithful to the original. Even the GBA soundfont can't escape the xylophones! Like...other dungeon songs besides that one exist.


The worst floor is this one right here, which stands among the worst minigames in all of Final Fantasy. You need to carefully look at the sprites of a bunch of dragons wandering a smoke-filled room, picking out the ones you're asked to, and fighting them. They can vary by number of horns, wing length, and tail length. Oh, and do this for three rounds, each asking you to take out an extra kind of dragon. If you kill too many or too few? You go back to the first round. Encounter the wrong kind of dragon? Even if you run, it counts against you. Note that running from the right kind doesn't count. At least the fights themselves are trivial encounters against Red Dragons.

The dungeon is pointed out to you when this guy in the cloak walks up to it in a cutscene. He appears to be some sort of avatar of Chronodia, an entity who does what it says at the end here and absorbs things to take their power.


And the fight itself. Yeah. It can just decide a solo character loses by using two physicals before they can get up the Defender buffs. Game over, go back and try again and hope you don't get that stupid dragon floor. There's only two ways around this - get lucky (and preferably quick enough to have to face only two physicals), or be slow enough and stall with full-power healing items until the third turn, where it's fixed to use...

...its signature, the Seal ability. Used every fifth turn - outside of the usual spell/ability loop for enemies in this game - this will randomly lock out one of Fight, Magic, or Items for several turns. Of course that's the danger with this fight and the latter strategy - if it locks out Items, that is very bad for any non-White Mage class who hasn't got its defenses up. The seal remains for three turns, effectively giving two turns of free ability use to every three turns of having one locked. Note that it only stops the command from being selected, any uses on the turn of the Seal still go through. Magic was harmless for Sofia of course, and Fight just entailed sitting on the buffs/Rune Axe for a few turns. And by the way, you can't save at all in this dungeon. So if it decides to physical your solo character twice in a row, you have to do all that tedium over again!!

Chronodia has several different forms, this being the strongest and most easily reached by breaking only blue seals. Lesser forms include it by itself (weakest and requiring all red seals), four with each of the four fiends, and two that combine Lich/Marilith and Kraken/Tiamat. Besides this move, it's capable of using several moves associated with the four fiends, such as Ink. Most of them are weak elemental moves, though it also has Flare.

And yes it is indeed a pain in the ass sometimes to fight those lesser forms. Finding the balance between a reasonable amount of time to wait and having no room for error can be annoying.


Okay look, you want to hear about all the bosses themselves, don't you? And you want to see all the floors too? And you don't want this to take another year to get out either? So I say...screw this place!!

It took me a while to come up with this. I was first going to just fight the last one while trying to hack in the value that says the floors have been completed and going in through a special feature that allows you to replay any of them. This didn't work. Then I tried to search for changed values, which also didn't work. It turned out to be as simple as searching for a true 01 when the blue seal was on, and a false 00 when it was not. Repeatedly. A lot. Eventually I narrowed it down to 13 values. And these ones were the correct ones.

0x00511109
0x0051110B
0x0051110C


Set these addresses all to 01, and the blue seal will be activated - and it counts in regards to unlocking the floors in the Time Chamber feature if you really want to cheat. Set the middle to 00, and the red seal will be on instead. It was a great way to go through the Labyrinth to demonstrate. Also unlock everything for save file completion purposes. Set them all to 00 temporarily if you run into a floor that bugs out because you need to do its puzzle to get through it - such as this floor here which asks you walk through all the orbs while the tiles collapse beneath you.

That said, I was mostly doing this with the intent for save file completion purposes on the side. You need to: complete the game twice, fill in the bestiary, and unlock the blue seal on all of these floors to unlock the full art gallery. Wasn't using it to cheat my way through for challenge purposes...just for sanity's purposes. I also found out how to manipulate the timer for that matter, so I didn't need to wait for red seals.


So here's Chronodia all on its lonesome after unlocking only red seals, with only the random woman (?) sticking out of it. Its exact attacks in each form hasn't been very well documented, but this one I would presume from what it did only has basic attacks. It still hits like a truck even in this form. It should come as no surprise that being a master of time, that it has access to several abilities associated with time magic in other games: including Haste (BAD)/Slow/Stop, Warp, and even Comet (same as Atomos) in some of its lesser forms. It can also use Kraken's Ink if it has it attached, the third tier elemental magic (I believe with Lich), Tiamat's abilities, and more.

This one is stuck with basic stuff, which still proved strangely difficult for Sofia. All of them really did thanks to that physical - weird, since I don't remember and didn't say that my Knight had nearly as much trouble with it. Regardless, the basic strategy was really the same between all fights - luck out and get up the Blink wall, get up a Light Curtain, buff with Hermes Shoes and a bit of Giant Gauntlet use, and beat it down.


It's the stuff leading up to it that was really interesting. The dungeon starts you off at one of three areas entitled "Modern Maze". Talking about each and every floor would take forever, so check this nice guide out for more details. They're all really basic and tolerable things that don't take very long. One that could be annoying asks that you open the right chest in a group of 9 according to what a group of fairies tell you (including one liar). But there's only four configurations, and the northwest fairy's dialogue lets you know which one you're on. You'll go through these until you complete one or fail all three.

Beating one of these throws you into Medieval Dungeons, which you'll get for several in a row so long as you continue to complete them. Generally not that bad either, aside from this annoying stealth-based one seen above. They others are either outright easy, like following a glowing orb's path like that one part of FF6, or easy with the right tools, like a task where ten figures rush by and you're asked questions about their positioning.


The really annoying thing about 100% completion is that you need to fail to reach the Ancient Catacombs areas, and fail even more to reach Primeval Pits. Some of the more annoying ones in these ones include mirroring a robot's movements in the latter or guiding some bats into an enclosed space in the former - they always turn right when they bump into something. Seems easy to figure out, but the layout is random and you can get some annoying configurations. And then there's relatively simple ones like this, easy if you're used to block puzzles.


If you succeed a lot, you'll reach Original Chaos and eventually Netherworld Crypt dungeons. Some of these combine various gimmicks from previous places into one mashup. The former is also home to that stupid dragon one I mentioned, although it's also home to one of the easiest - a simple "repeat the sequence" game. One of the coolest ones is this floor in the latter (or a similar floor that combines the dark maze with a lightning rod gimmick from the Primeval pits) - there's Warmechs running around! EXP pinatas at this stage of the game!


So yes. It's an annoying pain to through this place. But is it worth it? Well, you can get amazing equipment off the various forms of Chronodia - who is naturally much more defeatable with a full party. All of them give significant stat bonuses. They especially benefit Red Mages, as well as Warriors (same equipment including the incredibly strong Barbarian's Sword) and White Mages (get the Lordly Robes which regen 10% of their max HP). The problem is, of course, what can you use them on besides other Chronodia forms? As far as Sofia was concerned, she could only use the Survival Vest from the Kraken/Tiamat mix. Leaving aside the no equipment part of this variant, it wasn't optimal anyway. It does give +15 to Agility and Stamina, but the latter was maxed anyway and so even this ultimate armor reduced her defense.

I had her defeat this Chronodia form, which mercifully came easily enough, for this piece of equipment. Thought about beating the lesser forms (legit) for posterity, but it doesn't change too much - it's really just down to repeating the fight a lot until it doesn't two-shot the solo character.


Anyway, one consequence of having done the bonus dungeons is that Sofia became wildly overpowered for the final dungeon. The furthest savefile back I had was right after class change, followed by Sofia in Lifespring Grotto 20F for the first time in the mid 80s. So in other words, absolutely nothing was a threat. The fiends have much higher HP in this version of the game in their reincarnated forms, but that meant very little when Sofia could potato them in 1-2 hits. Even Tiamat fell in a single blow from Hermes Shoes boosted punches.

Before I did this and since I was using this file to max out the savefile, I took the time to get every bestiary entry. On the subject of save file maxing since I was doing it along the way, I new game plused off my solo Knight to carry over the Bestiary and Labyrinth of Time data. In spite of this, neither had ever faced a Shadow, Crawler, Basilisk, Soldier, or Poison Naga. The last one is understandable - a rare enemy in Hellfire Chasm's overworld area. The former two can paralyze (MURDER), or come with dangerous enemies, so I avoided them in the early game and never went back to fight them. Not sure about the other two, guess they never just never showed up when moving on through.


That said, some measures have been taken. That is to say, Chaos was goosed to a startling 20000HP in this version of the game!! He's still weaker than the superbosses, but is stronger than anything else you'd find in Soul of Chaos. And yes, his CUR4/Curaja is still around, though I haven't bothered to check if it is a full-heal, or "just" for 9999.


Still, he is definitely a step below said superbosses. With Sofia being horribly overpowered, I decided I was getting my money's worth and went beyond buffing to the moon, buffing all the way to Mars. I'm not sure if this is because you can raise attack higher than 255 with Saber/etc. or not (it would make sense, since you can raise accuracy higher). But yes. Even in this version of the game, Chaos can be one-shot by a solo Monk. And so Chaos is sucked into the dreaded White Hole. Thanks, Exdeath!


That's it.

Solo Monk was overall a bit harder in this version than it was in the original despite the easier earlier game, although that's mostly thanks to the increased HP values of the bosses. However, even if you ignore Soul of Chaos, the items with additional effects you get make up for it to some extent. Still, NES Solo could two-shot Chaos with no strings attached, and could've one-shot him with just a simple theoretical FAST. Sofia needed several turns of buffing to do the same.

Would I say this was a fun challenge? When not stressing over the madness of Soul of Chaos or Labyrinth of Time, then sure, I guess. Still, guess my motivation for this one wasn't as strong, but I did get it done in the end.

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