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FFR: Low Level NG+
Jan. 6th, 2024 08:39 pmThe low level game is a mainstay of challenge runs in RPGs. I was looking for something to do on Final Fantasy Renaissance's New Game+ mode, which starts you out promoted, increases enemy stats, AND gold/experience output. Furthermore, I was looking to do a particular achievement in the 2.0 version of the game. I felt low level was a memetic challenge (that didn't have an achievement) I could do with it.
The party for this was Dragoon, Time Wizard, and two Elementalists. Dragoon would make for a good frontman who could deal heavy damage with JUMP and SUPER JUMP when needed. The Elementalists could deal heavy damage and were one of the compulsory keys to this. Time Wizard was also needed.
You start with 10000G in New Game+ mode. I bought a starter set of equipment and set off. I got level 2 before GARLAND, who is still an absolute fraud. TERRAIN rolled this which instantly killed him.
PIRATEs were no issue either. It was harder getting to Pravoka than fighting them! This got me the ship. I purchased two things in Elfland: the FLOAT spell, which was going to be a key part of my strategy. And a Silver Spear for the Dragoon.
Next, I went to the Peninsula of Power. Yes, really. My ultimate goal for finishing this was level 16. It might seem like a lot, but that's only for the normal game. For New Game+, this was the best I felt was possible.
Three things allowed me to fight here even on New Game+. The first was the combination of the TANGLEVINE TERRAIN spell and DOUBLECAST. The former is an AoE spell with a chance to paralyze. The latter lets almost any spell cast twice. This let them render all the ZomBULLs and TROLLs here impotent. The second was SUPER JUMP, a skill from Dragoon that hit every enemy on the field with a guaranteed critical hit. They couldn't spam it, but it didn't matter. The other was the Elementalist's LIMIT: GEOSTORM. This is under most circumstances an AoE nuke that was more than enough to wipe the enemies with two of them.
Once I hit level 11, it was time for...the Ice Cave. FLOAT is a spell that is made for sequence breaking. It's a L3 spell as of the current version, and lets the party levitate over rivers and damage tiles as well as ignoring encounters. There's a bunch of catches with this like the saves being not permanent (and presently still bugging out the treasure chests to be empty if you reload a soft save after opening one), but it's still good. And really like I said, in regards to this, if you can beat the Ice Cave at a low level you honestly deserve the reward.
It took me a few attempts, since it is the Ice Cave. I just had to run from everything. Eventually, I figured out the best strategy was to try to make it through the first few rooms without trying to escape random encounters. I could FLOAT and grab the FLOATER directly in this version! Otherwise, I'd have been able to use WARP to facilitate getting this anyway and cutting out part of the dungeon. At this point, it was actually better to fall into the hole and go out the proper way. Three FLOATs were enough to carry me out.
With the airship to make things a bit easier, I grinded out the rest of the levels. And that was it: this party was basically done gaining experience. This was enough for L6 charges, which meant the TELE spell for Time Wizard.
This spell is a personalized EXIT that can be used without spell charges (as long as L6 charges are there to begin with) or the Time Wizard even being alive. It can take you to the last inn used, the ship, or the airship. After using it in Ordeals, this spell gets an additional function: to let you set a telepoint and go to and from at will, letting you set telepoints as much as you want. In other words, I never had to willingly deal with random encounters ever again.
That just left bosses. How was I going to beat them? Well, there were two ways. The first was to gather all the elemental bells and abuse GEOSTORM with the Blessed Bell to overkill everything for thousands of damage. But that's no fun.
The MARSH terrain set has a very special skill called PHANTOM. This reduces enemy morale by 40. It is non-elemental and there is no defense against it: it simply works. The SAMPLE ability of the Elementalists lets them take any skill set on the go. All there was to do in the dungeons was pick up equipment along the way: I got the Gold and Opal Bracelets and the Dragon Armor, the three Ribbons, two ProRings, the ProCape, and a couple other things.
Behold, a montage of fear. Every single boss in the game was scared into running away. I actually unlocked a hidden achievement too, by lighting the orbs in the same order that Korra from Avatar: The Last Airbender learned her abilities. Someone speculated this is what Earth/Fire/Wind/Water actually was; an Avatar reference, so I did some research and seems it's so. I kept an extra save to get the rest of these later.
And yes. That is WarMECH there. I did in fact encounter it on purpose just so I could scare it stupid too.
Well, there was one problem. I had to scare ASTOS too: there was a locked door in the past version of the Temple of Fiends! This is actually a vanilla thing, it just never comes up. Weird that it exists in the first place.
No problem. FLOAT avoided the WIZARDs outright. RUB landed but then he ran off in terror.
As always with this team, there was literally nothing to write about the dungeon itself because I skipped everything and anything with FLOAT and TELE. Here was what things looked like before heading into the finale.
CHAOS was no different from everything else I'd faced thus far. Not even he is immune to the effects of PHANTOM. I just had to wait until his actions weren't dangerous: ICE3 into LIT3 did it.
And so the ultimate evil runs away and was never heard from again. Or drops dead from a heart attack seconds after from how his death animation still plays. Run complete.
This not only earned me the achievement for forcing CHAOS to run, but it also earned me one for having a Time Mage learn only one spell per level: he actually only had three: BURST, FLOAT, and TELE. There's similar ones for all the other mages. Might be my next challenge.
An actual low level run on the normal renaissance mode would be interesting, but before then, hopefully this shitpost was amusing enough.
Index
The party for this was Dragoon, Time Wizard, and two Elementalists. Dragoon would make for a good frontman who could deal heavy damage with JUMP and SUPER JUMP when needed. The Elementalists could deal heavy damage and were one of the compulsory keys to this. Time Wizard was also needed.
You start with 10000G in New Game+ mode. I bought a starter set of equipment and set off. I got level 2 before GARLAND, who is still an absolute fraud. TERRAIN rolled this which instantly killed him.
PIRATEs were no issue either. It was harder getting to Pravoka than fighting them! This got me the ship. I purchased two things in Elfland: the FLOAT spell, which was going to be a key part of my strategy. And a Silver Spear for the Dragoon.
Next, I went to the Peninsula of Power. Yes, really. My ultimate goal for finishing this was level 16. It might seem like a lot, but that's only for the normal game. For New Game+, this was the best I felt was possible.
Three things allowed me to fight here even on New Game+. The first was the combination of the TANGLEVINE TERRAIN spell and DOUBLECAST. The former is an AoE spell with a chance to paralyze. The latter lets almost any spell cast twice. This let them render all the ZomBULLs and TROLLs here impotent. The second was SUPER JUMP, a skill from Dragoon that hit every enemy on the field with a guaranteed critical hit. They couldn't spam it, but it didn't matter. The other was the Elementalist's LIMIT: GEOSTORM. This is under most circumstances an AoE nuke that was more than enough to wipe the enemies with two of them.
Once I hit level 11, it was time for...the Ice Cave. FLOAT is a spell that is made for sequence breaking. It's a L3 spell as of the current version, and lets the party levitate over rivers and damage tiles as well as ignoring encounters. There's a bunch of catches with this like the saves being not permanent (and presently still bugging out the treasure chests to be empty if you reload a soft save after opening one), but it's still good. And really like I said, in regards to this, if you can beat the Ice Cave at a low level you honestly deserve the reward.
It took me a few attempts, since it is the Ice Cave. I just had to run from everything. Eventually, I figured out the best strategy was to try to make it through the first few rooms without trying to escape random encounters. I could FLOAT and grab the FLOATER directly in this version! Otherwise, I'd have been able to use WARP to facilitate getting this anyway and cutting out part of the dungeon. At this point, it was actually better to fall into the hole and go out the proper way. Three FLOATs were enough to carry me out.
With the airship to make things a bit easier, I grinded out the rest of the levels. And that was it: this party was basically done gaining experience. This was enough for L6 charges, which meant the TELE spell for Time Wizard.
This spell is a personalized EXIT that can be used without spell charges (as long as L6 charges are there to begin with) or the Time Wizard even being alive. It can take you to the last inn used, the ship, or the airship. After using it in Ordeals, this spell gets an additional function: to let you set a telepoint and go to and from at will, letting you set telepoints as much as you want. In other words, I never had to willingly deal with random encounters ever again.
That just left bosses. How was I going to beat them? Well, there were two ways. The first was to gather all the elemental bells and abuse GEOSTORM with the Blessed Bell to overkill everything for thousands of damage. But that's no fun.
The MARSH terrain set has a very special skill called PHANTOM. This reduces enemy morale by 40. It is non-elemental and there is no defense against it: it simply works. The SAMPLE ability of the Elementalists lets them take any skill set on the go. All there was to do in the dungeons was pick up equipment along the way: I got the Gold and Opal Bracelets and the Dragon Armor, the three Ribbons, two ProRings, the ProCape, and a couple other things.
Behold, a montage of fear. Every single boss in the game was scared into running away. I actually unlocked a hidden achievement too, by lighting the orbs in the same order that Korra from Avatar: The Last Airbender learned her abilities. Someone speculated this is what Earth/Fire/Wind/Water actually was; an Avatar reference, so I did some research and seems it's so. I kept an extra save to get the rest of these later.
And yes. That is WarMECH there. I did in fact encounter it on purpose just so I could scare it stupid too.
Well, there was one problem. I had to scare ASTOS too: there was a locked door in the past version of the Temple of Fiends! This is actually a vanilla thing, it just never comes up. Weird that it exists in the first place.
No problem. FLOAT avoided the WIZARDs outright. RUB landed but then he ran off in terror.
As always with this team, there was literally nothing to write about the dungeon itself because I skipped everything and anything with FLOAT and TELE. Here was what things looked like before heading into the finale.
CHAOS was no different from everything else I'd faced thus far. Not even he is immune to the effects of PHANTOM. I just had to wait until his actions weren't dangerous: ICE3 into LIT3 did it.
And so the ultimate evil runs away and was never heard from again. Or drops dead from a heart attack seconds after from how his death animation still plays. Run complete.
This not only earned me the achievement for forcing CHAOS to run, but it also earned me one for having a Time Mage learn only one spell per level: he actually only had three: BURST, FLOAT, and TELE. There's similar ones for all the other mages. Might be my next challenge.
An actual low level run on the normal renaissance mode would be interesting, but before then, hopefully this shitpost was amusing enough.
Index
