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FFR: Solo Green Mage Part I
Nov. 13th, 2023 05:29 pmWell, there was still one thing I wanted to do in Final Fantasy Renaissance before I broke for version 2.0. The solo challenge run has been a staple of many RPGs. Though I don't share the sentiment, Green Mage is considered by many FFR players to be the worst in the game. The complaints were so frequent that it is getting a new ability and a big rework of its spells in v2.0. And if I could do a solo Green Mage pre-buff, well, that'd be a fine feather in my cap, wouldn't it? Of all the solos I could do on the Renaissance mode, it spoke the most to me.
To catch up or for the benefit of those coming in unaware, the Green Mage is a magical job based around buffs. Its available spells are a mix of the White Mage's buffs and some exclusive to it alone, you can see a list of them from the magic list on the main page. While it has insane HP for a magical class, its offenses are as terrible as you'd expect. Its special commands are little consequence and buff spells remain situational in their use. This was going to be a tricky challenge that was going to take all of my patience and tenacity to complete, but I still don't think it's the hardest solo in FFR. That would almost certainly still be solo Thief or maybe the Evoker.
I bought the RUSE spell in Coneria for my solo character, christened Green. This was inspired by similar monochromatic mage solos of Sullla and T-Hawk on FF1 and FF5. I bought a set of clothes and a wooden staff, and three more for my additional characters to swing while they died. It was important in this early portion of the game to fight battles that I could get a net positive gold gain in. Since Green had to return to the inn to recharge on RUSE uses after each fight which cost 30G, they would slowly lose funds unless they fought groups that paid out at least this amount of gold. Five IMPs, or two GrIMPs could do this. These battles consisted of 2-3 casts of RUSE and beating away at them with Green's stick.
(Aside, friendly reminder that the town was never and never will be "Corneria". That's from 8-Bit Theater, or Star Fox. It is Coneria on NES and Cornelia in all future translations.)
One of the most important things in a low offense solo in Final Fantasy 1 is strength resetting. Every job has levels where their Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Vitality, or Luck will increase guaranteed, commonly called their SAIVL. On levels where there was not a guaranteed increase, each stat only has a 25% chance of increasing. There was no guide to SAIVL for the new classes, so I was effectively going in blind. Either way, I wanted to make sure that Green saw an increase in STR at every level. If I knew the Green Mage's SAIVL, I also would've tried for VIT increases whenever possible. That would add up to a lot of extra damage by the very end of the run, and they were going to need every point of it they could get. While it appeared that Lv2 had a guaranteed increase on all stats, I had to reset multiple times to get an increase on Lv3. Whenever I spotted what felt like a guaranteed STR increase, I would go for a VIT increase instead. Yes, this burned me sometimes.
It was at Lv4 that I decided to take a swing at GARLAND. I saved with a TENT outside of the Temple of Fiends. The objective was to get in, get the Cap in the bottom left corner of the temple, and defeat him. It took me a few resets until I only saw a lone SPIDER block Green's path on the way from there to the notorious fraud. Against the pathetic excuse for a boss himself, he can actually deal quite a bit of damage to an unarmored warrior. Unfortunately for him, three casts of RUSE and he was absolutely helpless. It didn't matter that Green was doing very little damage. He could not kill them short of a ridiculously unlucky 1/200 hit or so, and they eventually killed him.
Green ended up reaching level 5 when attempting to reach Pravoka. I bought them a pair of Gloves in the armor shop before taking on the PIRATEs. This was no different from the previous battle: three RUSE casts and they were in no danger, able to defeat them at their leisure. The ship had been claimed.
With this, Green was able to fight a wider variety of enemies. I set about Coneria and got to grinding. My goal was to get Green to level 12, where they would reach above 200HP. I saved after every encounter; with RUSE could defeat anything but OddEYEs which would quickly stun them and kill them. I also made use of EXUVIATION; this is an ability that dispels any active anti-spell and uses it to deal damage. It's normally a very crummy ability due to poor action economy, but it dealt acceptable damage for now. I sent them to the Dwarves' Cave for the money chests there at level 10 to break up the monotony. It took a while, but I eventually reached the desired level and was ready to start making attempts at the Marsh Cave. I bought a Copper Bracelet, normally a waste at 1000G, but every point of absorb was going to count here. I also bought around 60 HEALs and some TENTs to make it there and back. It was not necessary to buy PUREs at all: Green's innate RESIST POISON protected them from it entirely!
The most important thing when running the Marsh Cave - or any dungeon in the future - was to do this when Green was inevitably killed off. There is presently a quirk/inaccuracy in the latest version of Final Fantasy Renaissance where encounter order is reset after a game over. This likely happens due to the nature of the new file select screen, although Ozmo also indicated he was under the belief encounter order does reset after a game over which any challenge runner of the NES version can tell you isn't the case. If I was to simply take it as such and reload the save in that fashion, I would get the same encounters every time, much like Sullla had to contend with during the two challenges he did on the Classic Mode of Renaissance. By doing this, I could avoid this quirk.
There were many, many dangerous encounters in the cave. CRAWLs and GHOULs were the biggest threats as usual, being monsters who could instantly end Green's chances at getting through in one paralyzing hit. There wasn't much I could do against them except run away and hope for the best. Naturally since the run bug was fixed, this was never a guarantee. Other dangerous fights included SCORPIONs, GARGOYLEs, and large WrWOLF groups. Against the first and last of these, I would have Green use a single RUSE and try to run. The second called for two before doing so. There wasn't much point in fighting, not when any time spent could end up wasted when I inevitably failed.
I would make it to the WIZARDs many different times. Most simply got way too many that moved before Green could use RUSE, killing them on the spot. The strategy against them was to use that spell three times, use HARDEN as insurance in case of a critical hit, then DRINK to full health. I tried using EXUVIATION against them. This command dispels anti-spells cast on a target to deal non-elemental AoE damage. On one attempt I tried with three and the attack did about 30 to each WIZARD. That was a waste! Worse, future uses of the command would prove that this (using four buffs, the three elemental ones plus the Green Mage's own APOIS) was an outlier result.
Three attempts would get by them only to fail after. The first two successes past this point bumped into a group with a CRAWL steps away from the stairs up to B2. Green was paralyzed and that was the end of that. The third was ambushed by SCORPIONs. I used RUSE, but Green still died when one of them got some lucky shots in. The fourth was the run with the victory depicted above. Despite facing all four WIZARDs, I got insanely lucky with turn order. Green got their first RUSE off right away, two of them missed with just that, and the second RUSE made them mostly safe. A third sealed it. There were a few scares with encounters on the way out, but Green ran from them all before anything bad could happen. It took around 25-35 tries at the cave, but I was finally over the first major hurdle.
ASTOS can either be a very difficult opponent for a solo or he can be an easy one. Thankfully, Green Mage is one of the ones where he is easy. I had Green use REFLEC, the L4 spell that bounced back magic. It took several tries for ASTOS to off himself with his own RUB. But it was easy to reset and retry until the spell landed. It wasn't long until it did and Green was able to lay claim to the CRYSTAL.
The most difficult part of the KEY looting was obtaining the Silver Bracelet in the Marsh Cave; which was also the only thing that Green had a use for besides selling (they could use the Power Staff, but it's weaker than the Iron Staff). I wanted to save the 5000G on buying the defensive upgrade. At least I wouldn't have the WIZARDs to contend with: by walking along the top of the room then approaching the chest from the bottom, both spiked tiles could be avoided. It took me around 20 tries to loot the thing, but it was going to be worth it.
I felt that the Earth Cave was likely going to be the most difficult part of this challenge. I was able to grind in it early on by using the Hall of Giants, getting Green to level 18. The first two floors had nothing dangerous; everything could be escaped from and didn't hit too hard. If they did, I could use RUSE. It was the third floor that had many deadly encounters. Big SPECTER/GEIST groups and IMAGEs could paralyze, MUMMY groups could sleep lock, and of course, the COCTRICEs. Four of the eight encounters in the room could just instantly destroy Green on the spot! I actually tried to game the encounter table to help with this after too many deaths to stupid things. If I entered B3 after like 58 battles, there would only be two dangerous encounters - depending on my luck with steps. The first encounter after a hard reset is always 16 steps (that can have encounters) away, but those beyond are not so deterministic. Not to mentioned that getting that deep in the encounter table necessitated a lot of hard and soft resets. It wasn't the fastest solution, but it eventually ended up getting me the win.
But even when I did this or got through normally. The VAMPIRE itself was also very difficult because of his DAZZLE skill. This had a very high chance of paralyzing Green, leaving them helpless against his massive physical attacks. VAMPIREs have a massive 76 power and can also paralyze on their physicals. The only option I had was to hope he didn't use DAZZLE at 1/4 odds and if he did, that Green could dodge it. Two attempts made it here only to die a him. On the third, my first attempt at a big EXUVIATION fell flat when it did around 30 damage. I had to try again. I went to the well again, and thankfully, it did actual damage. Somehow my opinion of that skill has gotten even lower than it already was.
I eventually pulled out a victory with several more weaker EXUVIATIONs. There would be a couple of scary encounters on the way out, namely some COCTRICEs, but Green escaped those. I thought I would be safe once I made it to B2, only to see eight GARGOYLEs show up. I alertly had Green use FOG2 instead of trying to spam RUN. The result was the stone monsters doing single digit damage and eventually managing to get out. That was the only dangerous fight. Part one complete.
After healing and getting the ROD, I went right back in on a whimsy. Somehow, I actually ended up making it to the bottom floor; there were some scary encounters but I got out of them immediately. LICH at level 18 was not going to be easy, but the Green Mage had some tools to deal with him. The L1 SHELL spell would reduce magic damage by 20%, the anti-spells would cripple his magic, and RUSE could avoid his physicals. The only problems would be HOLD and how to deal damage. Bonking him with a staff wasn't going to do much in the way of damage. Both solutions could be found together: the REFLEC spell! By casting this at the right time, Green would avoid the HOLD and hopefully cause LICH to kill himself with his own magic like ASTOS.
Or so I thought. I thought it was an anomaly in my first playthrough when I tried to have my Evoker use CARBUNCLE against him. It was here that verified that yes, enemies do in fact jump around in their spell patterns when you use reflect! Enemies in Final Fantasy 1 use their spells in a set order, never deviating from the pattern unless you're playing the maligned Pixel Remaster version. LICH uses a spell at 75% odds, and will always cast them in the following order: ICE2-SLP2-FAST-LIT2-HOLD-FIR2-SLOW-SLEP. The battle started out with Green using AICE before the ICE2, all well and good. I had them follow up with two RUSE casts - the only two I had left - and used REFLEC on the next turn. The LIT2 was bounced back as expecting and dealt a very good 132 damage! Might've been better to bounce the FIR2, but I wanted to make sure HOLD got bounced. The next turn LICH used...SLEP??? He actually hit himself somehow although instantly woke up.
LICH would continue to deviate from his spell list. When I realized that this was really happening, I tried to have Green buff up and time an EXUVIATION. However, LICH kept using physicals instead. Eventually, I ran out of REFLECs. Green was hit by HOLD and quickly finished off from there.
I've fussed about several things in Renaissance before, but this is the first design thing I have a serious problem with (the Blue Magic learning chance is bad too but this is way worse). It completely defeats the purpose of reflect if enemies aren't actually going to cast their magic. I don't care what sort of excuse there is. FFR is full of things that can break the game in half. There is absolutely no reason for this other than to make reflect even more useless and situational.
Okay, so the game design is awful and I certainly got insanely lucky to make it down to the bottom floor. What now? Clearly, level 18 wasn't going to be enough to win here. If I wasn't allowed to win with REFLEC, I could only rely on magic defense and trying to blow the boneman apart with EXUVIATION. That wasn't too appealing either, since it was unreliable and crippled Green's defense. I did some preliminary testing with seven buffs, and an OGRE took only 40.
The chance for a spell to hit/double is equal to 148 + Spell Accuracy - Magic Defense. Then a roll between 0 and 200 is made. If the number is equal to or less than the chance to hit, it succeeds. With HOLD's accuracy of 64 and Green's MDef of 54, this worked out to a little over a 3/4 chance that it would hit. So grinding wouldn't do much good to save me from that. What it would do is boost Green's HP and spell charges. So if stopping HOLD was unlikely, why not stop the physicals? Green wouldn't be able to stop this with RUSE since paralysis removes all evasion. But there was another option: FOG and FOG2. At level 22, Green would have enough spell charges to cast the latter four times, giving a boost of 48. To ensure LICH's physicals would never be able to do more than 1 damage outside of critical hits, 80 would be required. Two castings of FOG would get Green the rest of the way with their absorb of 17. Ideally I'd have enough for a casting of SHELL too, and I'd still want three RUSEs because LICH's physical could critical at low odds. That left two L1 charges for the rest of the cave. Picking up INVS seemed in order as an alternate RUSE to deal with WIZARDs.
I settled on the Peninsula of Power. TYROs and big ZomBULL/TROLL groups gave solid payouts and the latter could be manipulated off a hard reset. With INVS, it shortly got to the point where I could do three battles before having to return to Pravoka for a spell recharge: Green got an eighth L1 spell charge at level 19, allowing them to go RUSE-RUSE-INVS-INVS on one fight. There was no danger and no threat, just a time sink.
Here's what their stats looked like after the grind was done. I had been making sure to get a STR increase on every level so far; I'd even done some tests here and there for test for fixed increases so I could get VIT increases. Speaking of, yeah. That VIT was only partially manipulated. Green Mage actually gets a lot of it and therefore a lot HP. Very helpful for this challenge to say the least.
It would take me many, many more tries to make it to the bottom of the Earth Cave again. Quite a few made it through B3 only to run into something paralyzing or petrifying on B4. I could have stopped the latter if I had purchased the ASTONE spell, but I had intuited (correctly) that REGEN2 was going to be the more valuable purchase long term. That spell not only had an expiration date, but EXUVIATION had proven to be questionable even with multiple buffs being dispelled. It was short term suffering for long term gain, and the spell had already proven its worth. 10% of Green's HP was over 40 per turn at this point, and that was only going to increase as the game went on. It and REGEN3 were going to be an integral part of the LICH fight and likely many more to come.
I finally got there. The most difficult and tense part of the fight was going to be getting the buffs up. Once that happened, I would be in good shape. I started off with an AICE that went after LICH, but the spell only did fifty-something damage. I got up some more buffs including a RUSE and the first REGEN3 tht I would use throughout the battle. Green had to spend a few turns paralyzed by HOLD so I got them ready for it in advance. After they recovered, I mixed in RUSE and managed to get all them and all FOG2 castings out of the way. ALIT and AFIR followed, the two FOGs, and SHELL. The result of all this buffing? LICH could never do more than 2 damage to Green physically, and his magic had been rendered inert. Green would still get repeatedly paralyzed and put to sleep, but there wasn't nearly as much danger. Every time they went below half health, I would have them use REGEN2 or REGEN3.
Green was of course only tapping LICH. They usually did 1 damage, but I saw as much as 13 and they even ripped out a critical hit for 43 or so. I did manage to get a couple REFLECs in that worked. LICH hit himself with a weak FIR2 one time. Another just whiffed entirely and a third wrapped all the way back to ICE2 after HOLD. They barely helped, but any help was going to be worth it. I didn't dare bother with EXUVIATION. It was absolutely not worth the risk. So after hundreds of rounds of beating on him with the Iron Staff...
Terminated! On the very first time I reached him again! That fight played out exactly the way I envisioned it would. It was a huge disappointment that REFLEC didn't work reliably here - you can bet I complained about it in an official capacity. Still, I managed to find a way through regardless and make it over possibly the biggest hurdle in the game! There were still going to be difficult spots ahead, but none that would call for as much luck and intricacy as I had to resort to here.
I'll break for the next page here, since I rambled quite a bit here, heh.
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To catch up or for the benefit of those coming in unaware, the Green Mage is a magical job based around buffs. Its available spells are a mix of the White Mage's buffs and some exclusive to it alone, you can see a list of them from the magic list on the main page. While it has insane HP for a magical class, its offenses are as terrible as you'd expect. Its special commands are little consequence and buff spells remain situational in their use. This was going to be a tricky challenge that was going to take all of my patience and tenacity to complete, but I still don't think it's the hardest solo in FFR. That would almost certainly still be solo Thief or maybe the Evoker.
I bought the RUSE spell in Coneria for my solo character, christened Green. This was inspired by similar monochromatic mage solos of Sullla and T-Hawk on FF1 and FF5. I bought a set of clothes and a wooden staff, and three more for my additional characters to swing while they died. It was important in this early portion of the game to fight battles that I could get a net positive gold gain in. Since Green had to return to the inn to recharge on RUSE uses after each fight which cost 30G, they would slowly lose funds unless they fought groups that paid out at least this amount of gold. Five IMPs, or two GrIMPs could do this. These battles consisted of 2-3 casts of RUSE and beating away at them with Green's stick.
(Aside, friendly reminder that the town was never and never will be "Corneria". That's from 8-Bit Theater, or Star Fox. It is Coneria on NES and Cornelia in all future translations.)
One of the most important things in a low offense solo in Final Fantasy 1 is strength resetting. Every job has levels where their Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Vitality, or Luck will increase guaranteed, commonly called their SAIVL. On levels where there was not a guaranteed increase, each stat only has a 25% chance of increasing. There was no guide to SAIVL for the new classes, so I was effectively going in blind. Either way, I wanted to make sure that Green saw an increase in STR at every level. If I knew the Green Mage's SAIVL, I also would've tried for VIT increases whenever possible. That would add up to a lot of extra damage by the very end of the run, and they were going to need every point of it they could get. While it appeared that Lv2 had a guaranteed increase on all stats, I had to reset multiple times to get an increase on Lv3. Whenever I spotted what felt like a guaranteed STR increase, I would go for a VIT increase instead. Yes, this burned me sometimes.
It was at Lv4 that I decided to take a swing at GARLAND. I saved with a TENT outside of the Temple of Fiends. The objective was to get in, get the Cap in the bottom left corner of the temple, and defeat him. It took me a few resets until I only saw a lone SPIDER block Green's path on the way from there to the notorious fraud. Against the pathetic excuse for a boss himself, he can actually deal quite a bit of damage to an unarmored warrior. Unfortunately for him, three casts of RUSE and he was absolutely helpless. It didn't matter that Green was doing very little damage. He could not kill them short of a ridiculously unlucky 1/200 hit or so, and they eventually killed him.
Green ended up reaching level 5 when attempting to reach Pravoka. I bought them a pair of Gloves in the armor shop before taking on the PIRATEs. This was no different from the previous battle: three RUSE casts and they were in no danger, able to defeat them at their leisure. The ship had been claimed.
With this, Green was able to fight a wider variety of enemies. I set about Coneria and got to grinding. My goal was to get Green to level 12, where they would reach above 200HP. I saved after every encounter; with RUSE could defeat anything but OddEYEs which would quickly stun them and kill them. I also made use of EXUVIATION; this is an ability that dispels any active anti-spell and uses it to deal damage. It's normally a very crummy ability due to poor action economy, but it dealt acceptable damage for now. I sent them to the Dwarves' Cave for the money chests there at level 10 to break up the monotony. It took a while, but I eventually reached the desired level and was ready to start making attempts at the Marsh Cave. I bought a Copper Bracelet, normally a waste at 1000G, but every point of absorb was going to count here. I also bought around 60 HEALs and some TENTs to make it there and back. It was not necessary to buy PUREs at all: Green's innate RESIST POISON protected them from it entirely!
The most important thing when running the Marsh Cave - or any dungeon in the future - was to do this when Green was inevitably killed off. There is presently a quirk/inaccuracy in the latest version of Final Fantasy Renaissance where encounter order is reset after a game over. This likely happens due to the nature of the new file select screen, although Ozmo also indicated he was under the belief encounter order does reset after a game over which any challenge runner of the NES version can tell you isn't the case. If I was to simply take it as such and reload the save in that fashion, I would get the same encounters every time, much like Sullla had to contend with during the two challenges he did on the Classic Mode of Renaissance. By doing this, I could avoid this quirk.
There were many, many dangerous encounters in the cave. CRAWLs and GHOULs were the biggest threats as usual, being monsters who could instantly end Green's chances at getting through in one paralyzing hit. There wasn't much I could do against them except run away and hope for the best. Naturally since the run bug was fixed, this was never a guarantee. Other dangerous fights included SCORPIONs, GARGOYLEs, and large WrWOLF groups. Against the first and last of these, I would have Green use a single RUSE and try to run. The second called for two before doing so. There wasn't much point in fighting, not when any time spent could end up wasted when I inevitably failed.
I would make it to the WIZARDs many different times. Most simply got way too many that moved before Green could use RUSE, killing them on the spot. The strategy against them was to use that spell three times, use HARDEN as insurance in case of a critical hit, then DRINK to full health. I tried using EXUVIATION against them. This command dispels anti-spells cast on a target to deal non-elemental AoE damage. On one attempt I tried with three and the attack did about 30 to each WIZARD. That was a waste! Worse, future uses of the command would prove that this (using four buffs, the three elemental ones plus the Green Mage's own APOIS) was an outlier result.
Three attempts would get by them only to fail after. The first two successes past this point bumped into a group with a CRAWL steps away from the stairs up to B2. Green was paralyzed and that was the end of that. The third was ambushed by SCORPIONs. I used RUSE, but Green still died when one of them got some lucky shots in. The fourth was the run with the victory depicted above. Despite facing all four WIZARDs, I got insanely lucky with turn order. Green got their first RUSE off right away, two of them missed with just that, and the second RUSE made them mostly safe. A third sealed it. There were a few scares with encounters on the way out, but Green ran from them all before anything bad could happen. It took around 25-35 tries at the cave, but I was finally over the first major hurdle.
ASTOS can either be a very difficult opponent for a solo or he can be an easy one. Thankfully, Green Mage is one of the ones where he is easy. I had Green use REFLEC, the L4 spell that bounced back magic. It took several tries for ASTOS to off himself with his own RUB. But it was easy to reset and retry until the spell landed. It wasn't long until it did and Green was able to lay claim to the CRYSTAL.
The most difficult part of the KEY looting was obtaining the Silver Bracelet in the Marsh Cave; which was also the only thing that Green had a use for besides selling (they could use the Power Staff, but it's weaker than the Iron Staff). I wanted to save the 5000G on buying the defensive upgrade. At least I wouldn't have the WIZARDs to contend with: by walking along the top of the room then approaching the chest from the bottom, both spiked tiles could be avoided. It took me around 20 tries to loot the thing, but it was going to be worth it.
I felt that the Earth Cave was likely going to be the most difficult part of this challenge. I was able to grind in it early on by using the Hall of Giants, getting Green to level 18. The first two floors had nothing dangerous; everything could be escaped from and didn't hit too hard. If they did, I could use RUSE. It was the third floor that had many deadly encounters. Big SPECTER/GEIST groups and IMAGEs could paralyze, MUMMY groups could sleep lock, and of course, the COCTRICEs. Four of the eight encounters in the room could just instantly destroy Green on the spot! I actually tried to game the encounter table to help with this after too many deaths to stupid things. If I entered B3 after like 58 battles, there would only be two dangerous encounters - depending on my luck with steps. The first encounter after a hard reset is always 16 steps (that can have encounters) away, but those beyond are not so deterministic. Not to mentioned that getting that deep in the encounter table necessitated a lot of hard and soft resets. It wasn't the fastest solution, but it eventually ended up getting me the win.
But even when I did this or got through normally. The VAMPIRE itself was also very difficult because of his DAZZLE skill. This had a very high chance of paralyzing Green, leaving them helpless against his massive physical attacks. VAMPIREs have a massive 76 power and can also paralyze on their physicals. The only option I had was to hope he didn't use DAZZLE at 1/4 odds and if he did, that Green could dodge it. Two attempts made it here only to die a him. On the third, my first attempt at a big EXUVIATION fell flat when it did around 30 damage. I had to try again. I went to the well again, and thankfully, it did actual damage. Somehow my opinion of that skill has gotten even lower than it already was.
I eventually pulled out a victory with several more weaker EXUVIATIONs. There would be a couple of scary encounters on the way out, namely some COCTRICEs, but Green escaped those. I thought I would be safe once I made it to B2, only to see eight GARGOYLEs show up. I alertly had Green use FOG2 instead of trying to spam RUN. The result was the stone monsters doing single digit damage and eventually managing to get out. That was the only dangerous fight. Part one complete.
After healing and getting the ROD, I went right back in on a whimsy. Somehow, I actually ended up making it to the bottom floor; there were some scary encounters but I got out of them immediately. LICH at level 18 was not going to be easy, but the Green Mage had some tools to deal with him. The L1 SHELL spell would reduce magic damage by 20%, the anti-spells would cripple his magic, and RUSE could avoid his physicals. The only problems would be HOLD and how to deal damage. Bonking him with a staff wasn't going to do much in the way of damage. Both solutions could be found together: the REFLEC spell! By casting this at the right time, Green would avoid the HOLD and hopefully cause LICH to kill himself with his own magic like ASTOS.
Or so I thought. I thought it was an anomaly in my first playthrough when I tried to have my Evoker use CARBUNCLE against him. It was here that verified that yes, enemies do in fact jump around in their spell patterns when you use reflect! Enemies in Final Fantasy 1 use their spells in a set order, never deviating from the pattern unless you're playing the maligned Pixel Remaster version. LICH uses a spell at 75% odds, and will always cast them in the following order: ICE2-SLP2-FAST-LIT2-HOLD-FIR2-SLOW-SLEP. The battle started out with Green using AICE before the ICE2, all well and good. I had them follow up with two RUSE casts - the only two I had left - and used REFLEC on the next turn. The LIT2 was bounced back as expecting and dealt a very good 132 damage! Might've been better to bounce the FIR2, but I wanted to make sure HOLD got bounced. The next turn LICH used...SLEP??? He actually hit himself somehow although instantly woke up.
LICH would continue to deviate from his spell list. When I realized that this was really happening, I tried to have Green buff up and time an EXUVIATION. However, LICH kept using physicals instead. Eventually, I ran out of REFLECs. Green was hit by HOLD and quickly finished off from there.
I've fussed about several things in Renaissance before, but this is the first design thing I have a serious problem with (the Blue Magic learning chance is bad too but this is way worse). It completely defeats the purpose of reflect if enemies aren't actually going to cast their magic. I don't care what sort of excuse there is. FFR is full of things that can break the game in half. There is absolutely no reason for this other than to make reflect even more useless and situational.
Okay, so the game design is awful and I certainly got insanely lucky to make it down to the bottom floor. What now? Clearly, level 18 wasn't going to be enough to win here. If I wasn't allowed to win with REFLEC, I could only rely on magic defense and trying to blow the boneman apart with EXUVIATION. That wasn't too appealing either, since it was unreliable and crippled Green's defense. I did some preliminary testing with seven buffs, and an OGRE took only 40.
The chance for a spell to hit/double is equal to 148 + Spell Accuracy - Magic Defense. Then a roll between 0 and 200 is made. If the number is equal to or less than the chance to hit, it succeeds. With HOLD's accuracy of 64 and Green's MDef of 54, this worked out to a little over a 3/4 chance that it would hit. So grinding wouldn't do much good to save me from that. What it would do is boost Green's HP and spell charges. So if stopping HOLD was unlikely, why not stop the physicals? Green wouldn't be able to stop this with RUSE since paralysis removes all evasion. But there was another option: FOG and FOG2. At level 22, Green would have enough spell charges to cast the latter four times, giving a boost of 48. To ensure LICH's physicals would never be able to do more than 1 damage outside of critical hits, 80 would be required. Two castings of FOG would get Green the rest of the way with their absorb of 17. Ideally I'd have enough for a casting of SHELL too, and I'd still want three RUSEs because LICH's physical could critical at low odds. That left two L1 charges for the rest of the cave. Picking up INVS seemed in order as an alternate RUSE to deal with WIZARDs.
I settled on the Peninsula of Power. TYROs and big ZomBULL/TROLL groups gave solid payouts and the latter could be manipulated off a hard reset. With INVS, it shortly got to the point where I could do three battles before having to return to Pravoka for a spell recharge: Green got an eighth L1 spell charge at level 19, allowing them to go RUSE-RUSE-INVS-INVS on one fight. There was no danger and no threat, just a time sink.
Here's what their stats looked like after the grind was done. I had been making sure to get a STR increase on every level so far; I'd even done some tests here and there for test for fixed increases so I could get VIT increases. Speaking of, yeah. That VIT was only partially manipulated. Green Mage actually gets a lot of it and therefore a lot HP. Very helpful for this challenge to say the least.
It would take me many, many more tries to make it to the bottom of the Earth Cave again. Quite a few made it through B3 only to run into something paralyzing or petrifying on B4. I could have stopped the latter if I had purchased the ASTONE spell, but I had intuited (correctly) that REGEN2 was going to be the more valuable purchase long term. That spell not only had an expiration date, but EXUVIATION had proven to be questionable even with multiple buffs being dispelled. It was short term suffering for long term gain, and the spell had already proven its worth. 10% of Green's HP was over 40 per turn at this point, and that was only going to increase as the game went on. It and REGEN3 were going to be an integral part of the LICH fight and likely many more to come.
I finally got there. The most difficult and tense part of the fight was going to be getting the buffs up. Once that happened, I would be in good shape. I started off with an AICE that went after LICH, but the spell only did fifty-something damage. I got up some more buffs including a RUSE and the first REGEN3 tht I would use throughout the battle. Green had to spend a few turns paralyzed by HOLD so I got them ready for it in advance. After they recovered, I mixed in RUSE and managed to get all them and all FOG2 castings out of the way. ALIT and AFIR followed, the two FOGs, and SHELL. The result of all this buffing? LICH could never do more than 2 damage to Green physically, and his magic had been rendered inert. Green would still get repeatedly paralyzed and put to sleep, but there wasn't nearly as much danger. Every time they went below half health, I would have them use REGEN2 or REGEN3.
Green was of course only tapping LICH. They usually did 1 damage, but I saw as much as 13 and they even ripped out a critical hit for 43 or so. I did manage to get a couple REFLECs in that worked. LICH hit himself with a weak FIR2 one time. Another just whiffed entirely and a third wrapped all the way back to ICE2 after HOLD. They barely helped, but any help was going to be worth it. I didn't dare bother with EXUVIATION. It was absolutely not worth the risk. So after hundreds of rounds of beating on him with the Iron Staff...
Terminated! On the very first time I reached him again! That fight played out exactly the way I envisioned it would. It was a huge disappointment that REFLEC didn't work reliably here - you can bet I complained about it in an official capacity. Still, I managed to find a way through regardless and make it over possibly the biggest hurdle in the game! There were still going to be difficult spots ahead, but none that would call for as much luck and intricacy as I had to resort to here.
I'll break for the next page here, since I rambled quite a bit here, heh.
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