FFR: Solo Archer Part I

Oh dear lord.

Archer is one of the two more recently added jobs to Final Fantasy Renaissance. If it wasn't for one broken-ass ability this job has after promotion, I'd easily say it would be worse than Evoker and therefore the worst job this expanded fan remake has to offer. The flaws with the job aren't immediately apparent. But believe me in this preamble, this one is sucky. At the very least, being solo will allow me to show what it's capable of better than any party except four of them could.

Robin is such an awkward name on its own. I thought about Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow. In the end, I decided to take a cue from Sullla's solo Archer in FF5 and go for a mythological route. Yahata, better known as Hachiman in the modern age, is a Shinto deity representing war and archery. Not the first time I've used the name, either!


Bows were naturally added as a weapon type for Archers. On paper, they might seem fine. 5 power isn't much: it's the same as the Small Knife (their other weapon type). But 10 critical! Archers come with the same hit% growth curve as Fighters and Lancers: they start with 10 and gain 3% on every level up. They can wear Wooden Armor for what it's worth early on.


They have solid stats to boot: luck is gained roughly every other level. They have high AGI growth too, and shockingly high HP. It's really weird: their fixed VIT is flaky, but they get a strong HP growth every even level (trivia, it used to be every odd up to a point, which got changed because it made them the only class that didn't get a strong HP up at 2 and that was awkward). STR is fine, and they make no use of INT.

So what's the big deal here?


This.

Bows will only ever get one hit. Asterisk: FAST works with them, thankfully by design. But otherwise? One hit, period. Hit% is instead added into the damage formula. It's opaque how: we've speculated it's half added as flat damage, but the numbers I saw with some testing didn't completely line up. I've talked about how one hit doesn't really work in FFR in my Dark Knight writeup, but at least they eventually do get multiple and do so much damage with their greatswords that it eventually makes up for it. If you think bows are like that too, well. The first one is as strong as the Small Knife, the weakest weapon in the game (even a Wooden Staff has more base damage). That's the pattern. It also goes without saying that if that one hit missed, you're SOL.

So you might be thinking it's better to just stick with knives then, right? There's even some new ones that they get access to. Well, here's the rub: the Archer's core class features, aside from that broken ability I mentioned, all rely on having a bow. HUNTER and ARROWCRAFT go together: if the Archer kills an enemy with a normal attack (bow, knife, or unarmed), they gain special materials. They can be used to forge magic arrows which can then be "cast" in battle. Some of these are pretty decent! But that's the problem: the Archer has to kill stuff. With low damage from bows and knives alike, they are terrible at killing stuff.

Their AIM command also needs a bow: it can be stacked across 1-3 turns, increasing the damage by 120% each time (this seems to affect the actual damage stat rather than multiplying the damage). It's technically stronger than normal attacks: you're doing 220% damage across two turns. In a game with rocket tag gameplay.

Their last ability for now is DETECT TRAPs. It's kinda cute: it highlights spiked tiles. I'll show it off when I can.


For now, a bow was better. It was enough to one-shot IMPs on the outside. Here's what killing an enemy with an Archer looks like. The majority of enemies will drop something on their defeat. For IMPs, this was just FANGs. They're the most common drop and go into every arrow. WOLFs can drop those and HIDEs as well.


Archers have an interesting pause MAGIC menu: instead of just listing your spells, you can craft arrows here. You can hold a maximum of 12 of each arrow, and if you're running multiple Archers, they have to share their "charges" for better or worse. That said, you can hold up to 99 of each material and can craft at will, so at worst it's 12 each per battle. Arrow "magic" more or less resolves as a physical attack with riders attached, up to and including being able to miss and critical hit. FANG SHOT reduces an enemy's attack, while LEG SHOT...well. I'll get to that shortly.

Level 3 was good enough for GARLAND. I had Yahata drop a save outside just in case and walked in.


And this is LEG SHOT. All magic arrows beyond the first have a flat 50% chance of inflicting a status ailment. In the case of this, it's paralysis. It deals "double effectiveness" on enemies of the right type, which is giants in case of this one. It means a 100% chance of an infliction and maybe the usual 4-8 extra damage. I still lost this fight when GARLAND broke out and killed Yahata because he kept missing the procs on FANG SHOT.


I gave AIM a try next time, and that did better: a solid 73 damage hit or so after the initial paralyzing hit. More than enough to win!

Across the water after though, things got bad. There were more materials to get from the enemies there. I'll cover them in a bit.


Archer is a very slow killer. At the start of the game where everything has one hit, it's actually one of the hardest hitting jobs out there. Then that advantage very quickly evaporates. For example, at level 7 with a Rapier, a Warrior has 2-hits. They'll have 22 total attack. So before enemy absorb, they're dealing 22-44 damage twice. Skew these numbers even more if you grind them out a Silver Sword, and hey: basically every job has a counterpart.

Actually, let's do just that. A Warrior has 36 total attack at level 7 with a Silver Sword: 36-72 across 2-hits. The Elven Bow is the Archer's counterpart: 12/20/15 offenses. They can have a maximum of 13 STR at this point, so an individual hit deals 24-48 damage. 48 hit% which works out to 24 extra. So at most, they would do like 72. The upper end of a Warrior hit. That's all before enemy absorb, which hurts the Archer even more. In practice when I did a casual when the job was first released (Warrior, Red Mage, Spellblade, Archer), it was by far the weakest physical force in the Marsh Cave. The Warrior and Spellblade would smack something for over a hundred damage, the Red Mage would be a bit behind (if not nuking stuff), and the Archer would be doing like 40. These numbers only get worse as the game goes along.

Of course, the other problem with being slow and having weakish armor is that enemies can gang up and kill the Archer easily in a solo setting. Some would take it like a champ, and all of them can hit harder than they could hope for. And knives are weak and the damage works out to around the same anyway. They're pretty dire...

In short, it was time to grind for the PIRATEs. Archer is one of a few jobs so far that has no easy answer to them (uniquely, their promoted version does, but that's only relevant in New Game+). They have to go right through. I was no stranger to it having done solo Thief before. I needed to have Yahata find his footing first before grinding near Pravoka. It's that bad. I even splurged on a Longbow (8/15/10) just to gain any advantage I could.


This is without question the most convoluted grind method I've ever done. HIDEs drop from WOLFs and were guaranteed to drop from MADPONYs. Groups of them were the fourth and second encounters after a hard reset, though the latter could be tough fighting. This provided LEG SHOT ammo. OGREs happen to be giants, so it was a guaranteed paralyze on them. Yahata could then pepper them with arrows or AIM until they dropped.


Aside, want to know something funny? GIANTs are giants. Shock and awe, I know. This was more memetic than ideal, but Yahata could kill them.


I decided level 10 would be enough to handle the PIRATEs. I had Yahata use a knife instead to cut out the chance of missing. One nice thing here was high evasion making him relatively dodgy. I whittled the number of PIRATEs down to four, had my Archer chug HEALs, then finished them off.


First try, nice. That could have gone a lot worse.

So now Yahata had the materials for several more shots. TAILs (which I got mainly from SHARKs for now) went into TAIL SHOT, which had a slow effect and is effective on aquatics. Yeah, this is "screw over KRAKEN: the weapon", but everything else still has a flat 50% of being hit. It's what's nice about the arrows, there is no resistance short of resisting the status itself, which only CHAOS and some FFR exclusive enemies can. You either win the coinflip or you don't.

BLOOD came from several sources: squidmen have it guaranteed, but giant and ogre type enemies drop it. They combine with the usual FANGs and TONGUEs (Creeps, Lizards, and always from dark elves) and EYEs (eyes mainly, but again from giants and ogres) for THROAT SHOT and HEAD SHOT respectively. The latter targets humanoids and can inflict blind, confusion, or stone. It can mess up the Dancer superboss (immune to the other two but gets crippled by blind for mechanical reasons) but that's about it, the status is a diceroll. But THROAT SHOT, this one inflicts silence. Its target? Spellcasters (aka mage).

Recent FFR versions classify anything that uses magic as one (and removes the property from TIAMAT who didn't use it), so you can shut off the spells and skills of them guaranteed. Even if they only use skills, you can shut them down. Some enemies do have silence awareness now in FFR; I'm assuming LICH is one of them because CHAOS got immunity I assume just because this exists, and Ozmo loves his balancing that makes using status sometimes counterintuitive. Still, physicals are often way easier to deal with than spells, so.


I went into the Marsh Cave with Yahata at level 13. I had been making sure to keep Yahata's LUCK high, which paid off in being able to escape from most encounters on the first try. Here's what DETECT TRAPs looks like in action. You see a little glowing tile where the fixed encounters are. Like I said, it's cute, and there is a minor gameplay aspect to this after promotion, but that's about it. There's no disarming the traps here.

The WIZARDs basically boiled down to landing paralysis on them. While the squid monsters are considered to be aquatic, there wasn't much point in hitting a TAIL SHOT on them.

Oh yes, and slimes were here too. This is important because they dropped GEL. This and ASH went into SPIRIT SHOT: effective on MagicBeasts (sic, as they're called in game; called magical in AstralEsper's guide) and has the chance to reduce magic defense by half. So in other words, almost useless for Yahata: he could still use this followed by the Bane Sword or Wizard Staff, but that's about it. His magic arrows have fixed odds of infliction independent of magic defense.


ASTOS was when I used THROAT SHOT for the first time. 100% odds of silencing a spellcaster! The dark elf was near helpless at this point.


All he could do was swing futilely as Yahata charged up and arrow and drove it through his tongue. If there is one thing Archer is good at, it's dealing with bosses. They can cheese just about any of them with their status. Thing is, most of the threat in FF1 comes from random encounters. And while Yahata was gaining a lot of them, you really have to baby an Archer in a full party to get any.

There's a lot to say and write about this job, so we'll cut here.

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FFR: Solo Archer Part II

There was nothing to loot with the Mystic KEY except stuff to sell for money. The Silver Bow in Crescent Lake had 15/25/25 offenses, being a clean upgrade over the Elven Bow. Contrast with the Iron Bow from Melmond: 20/0/15. It's pure bait: Silver Bow is always going to do more damage. Armorwise, he picked up a Silver Bracelet (there was no need to go for the one in the Marsh Cave this time). And there was also another interesting piece of equipment: scarves can presently be worn by the Dancer, Bard, and Archer classes. They're mechanically shields with some riders. I skipped the first one in Elfland, but picked this one up.

Linen grants no absorb bonus, but adds 8 to hit%. Most armor in FF1 has a weight value, and scarves have a negative value (actually an evasion value as FFR listed), which results in increasing evade! The one in Elfland does give 1 absorb, but only -1 weight and +5 hit%. It's so insignificant that I totally forgot about it.


Well, next step is grinding. 44 MDef is nowhere near what I'm comfortable with for the Earth Cave. It probably won't be here. But if you're wondering, it looks like this. Not the best shot of it, but yeah, it's a glowy mess.


It actually was the Hall of Giants. Just stun the guys and go to work. Wasn't expecting that, but all of the other spots weren't great: EARTHs were too hard, peninsula was just viably GIANTs and maybe TYROs anyway and big groups of the former still hurt, outside Crescent had big groups. From observation here, the math on bows seems to be not as speculated.

I did some testing on damage numbers. Against SHARKs and their 0 absorb, with 27 damage and 94 hit% and excluding criticals, Yahata did: 80, 132, 149, 86, 97, 92, 138, 86, 123, 86, 120, 135, 120, 112, 103, 141, 135, 109, 138, 146, 149, 129. Doesn't line up with adding half of hit% as flat damage or to the damage formula directly: it seems closer to the latter plus some extra points. Unfortunately, the exact formula is opaque. But let's talk more about it.

To contrast, a Warrior with a Silver Sword getting 3-hits? 39-78 is their base damage at 14, so 117-234. A Thief at 14? 16 STR, worst case. Let's have them use the Dragon or Coral Sword for the maximum 27 damage they can have in this worst case. 27-54 across two hits: 52-108. Not that much worse. A Monk does 28-56 on 4, also clowning the Archer.

Hell, Dark Knight with a Cobalt Greatsword just gets to 2-hits at 14. Let's assume 26 STR there: 60-120 damage across 2-hits. Pretty good finally, and a shade behind Archer if one of the hits misses! With Bastard for higher accuracy, that's still 38-76 across two, matching the Archer at worst. Or even a Red Mage: I'll lowball 18 STR there, 32-72 across two. Similarly comparable. The Spellblade? Oh those are fun, they get a 50% damage boost when wielding an elemental weapon and 100% when hitting a weakness: with 18 STR at 14, that's 43-86 with the Acid Sword if it works by affecting damage directly: 86-172. And that's all before defense.

I could go on and on. In short, they're effectively on the level of part-time physical attackers like the Red and Blue Mages, though ahead of Thief and Dancer (both of which get better). Where Archers are supposed to compensate is the ability to critical hit way more often: Silver Bow had a one-in-four shot of it. It's still not exactly reliable.


It's worth noting that not all enemies give a material drop. GARGOYLEs are one of them. They could hypothetically drop WINGs, but they just don't. But strangely? SHADOWs were worth fighting. These undead are notable for two things: having the highest ambush rate in the game and hitting for darkness instead of paralysis. That meant they were a safe source of ASH.


I decided on the somewhat suicidal level 20 to go after the VAMPIRE. I got there on a good string of encounters, so it went fairly well. I could've gambled on a HEAD SHOT since he's a humanoid, but I went ahead and used an AIM for the kill. The only question is could he escape? He had to fight three WIZARDs and flee from two sets of three IMAGEs, but he did so.

After fetching the ROD, the trip down to LICH was ended by ridiculously unlucky circumstances: 4 COCTRICEs appeared, and Yahata failed his run attempt. I had been gaining LUCK every level, so this was unlikely. To add insult to injury, he endured all the attacks only to be petrified by the very last one. Something similar happened on the runback: a run fail, followed by paralyzing undead.

Third run in went smooth. I actually paused to figure out where I was on the encounter table when I got to the plate: 62 was the next encounter. 1-4-6-1-4-3 were going to be the next ones. Because the tables were fixed, I could now see what they were: 1 downstairs is 2-4 WIZARDs. 4 is TROLLs, 6 is GrIMP/WrWOLF/GIANTs, and hopefully I'm out by 3 which are IMAGEs. 1 up here is safe: WrWOLFs and GrWOLFs. No sticking beyond that though: 4 is the undead up here. Because WIZARDs are suspect, I decided I'd pull the wolves.


The two encounters from there weren't a problem. In fact, only 2 WrWOLFs spawned, so I just had Yahata flee. The slot 1 rolled two WIZARDs. Good. I TAIL SHOT them for safety and got to the stairs.

4 and 3 are no threat on B5. It's slot 2 IMAGEs to watch for. Which would be right after. But IMAGEs are slot 3 on B4, so forward. B5 lasted two encounters and Yahata was at LICH. I decided I'd risk it and THROAT SHOT him. He hit with a 144 damage ICE2 before that and got silenced. The shot went critical for 140. LICH did a physical attack and failed to paralyze.


Of course I was going for the paralyze next. It was a coinflip whether it would take: LICH is a MagicBeast and a spellcaster. But then Yahata pulled out a critical for 260 for the exact damage kill.


Somewhat arbitrarily and to double-check something (if BAHAMUT has any particular reaction to only having Archer TAILs, he does not), I decided to go for Gurgu Volcano next. I was disappointed to confirm that Archers cannot use the Scale Armor. You would think the thing that poaches monsters would wear their remains, but it's not the case.

But this was where I could obtain the last two materials. SCALEs are weird in how they're the only resource without a guaranteed source of dropping. They can drop from Dragons (both sprites), Hydras, Naga, Worms, Wyverns, and TIAMAT, but all of them dropped something else. Furthermore, you need two of them to pull off a SCALE SHOT. You might think that it's something amazing due to the extra hassle needed. It's not: it reduces enemy defense by 4-8, guaranteed on dragons. Enemy defense tends to be either so high it won't make a dent, or so low it won't make a diffrence.

Then there's WINGs. As you might expect, anything with wings drops those. I could've gotten them from COCTRICEs or slot 8 WYVERNs on the peninsula, but why bother for something so insignificant? On paper, WING SHOT is nice: it nullifies touch effects on enemy physicals. Tag a SORCERER and proc, and all they can do is poke you with their spaghetti arms and pray for TRANCE stunlocking forever. Hit a zombie, and there goes its stun strike. But then the question becomes: what about their friends? These enemies tend to show up in massive groups. Even if you hit and succeed in the dice roll, there's still the rest of the horde. I guess you can hit CHAOS with it because he's a boss with a paralyzing strike to spare an unribboned party member, but then you can also use LEG SHOT (or ARUB if you have access).


The first time Yahata fought KARY, this happened. TAIL SHOT procced and brought her down to dealing around 40-60 damage, but that did too much. The second time, he went first. Then he hit LEG SHOT.


The smart thing to do from here was AIM and fire. Instead I gambled for fun and spite. Keep in mind though, there's only a 1/6 chance of this effective instant death at best assuming equal distribution of the status ailments. Contrast the broken LEG SHOT, which has a 50-50 chance of making something dead to rights.

There wasn't much to write about Ordeals. except for a ridiculous fight against MUMMYs and WzMUMMYs. Yahata kept being knocked asleep, woken up, then knocked back asleep. He actually managed to kill two of them because of the aforementioned quirk with FIGHT attacks being executed if woken up midround. I had to flee after that because he was so low on health. I one-shot the ZombieD with a STUN arrow.


Bears repeating, but using the Zeus Gauntlet (or anything else) to kill enemies does not net you material drops. I used it on the rivers and for some early attempts at the Ice Cave to deal with WIZARDs (that and overleveling were Yahata's only options for dealing with large groups of them), but that's it for spellcasting items.

Well, I gave Ice Cave a few tries as it stood, but quickly decided nah, my patience for this is less than my patience for a grind. And when it comes to a grind, it's a matter of finding the right spot for one. And I found a very strange one.


You probably know this spot for being full of Silver equipment you tend to ignore because it's outdated or questionable. So you might not know that this tile here has a Gray W. But it made sense for Yahata: it's near the entrance, it's always a single enemy, it pays out a decent amount, and I guess I can farm SCALEs here for what little it's worth. FIRE burned through HEALs faster with no material drops and AGAMA was too far in.


I got up to level 31 to give Yahata 75 MDef. The real danger here was PERILISKs on the way out. Thankfully they never did kill him, but R.GOYLEs almost did! He failed to run and got hit with HOLD. He only escaped because two of them ran themselves.

With that out of the way, the Ice Cave was a smooth second try. Yahata did get stunned by the undead spike, only to break out on the same turn and escape. Then a single SORCERER showed its ugly face. I had Yahata attack it for the kill, safer than running. The EYE wasn't a threat and died instantly to a THROAT SHOT no less. Got out of the second go at the undead spike cleanly and nothing else dangerous popped up.


One last thing to talk about that didn't even take an extra step to pick up since the bottom spaces of rooms have no encounters. The Icepick is one of the new knives in FFR (the first was in Earth Cave and I didn't want to chance picking up for a meme). It has 18/25/3 offenses, and as you might expect, is ice-elemental. Yahata currently had 5-hits with the weapon.

I ran some damage tests against ZomBULLs. Yahata has 39 attack, they have 14 absorb.

Icepick: 192, 241, 198, 234, 200, 245, 257, 216, 160, 244, 214, 176, 230, 233, 217, 225
Silver Bow: 128, 148, 240, 136, 194, 175, 117, 136, 221, 225, 225, 224, 190, 182, 186, 167

This isn't factoring in crits where the Silver Bow could suddenly do like 480 damage (or 278) if it rolled the 25%; Icepick has about an 11% chance of one of the rolls going critical. This is where the problems with bows' one hit really starts to become apparent. Like I said though, the job is technically saved from being bottom of the barrel in a normal party by trivializing bosses with STUN arrows and HUNTER'S MARK. If you're the type to hold back from brokenness? Yeah, it'd be the worst job if not for these.

In practical terms, though? This meant I switched Yahata to the Icepick. I was past the point where randoms were a threat, and having more consistent damage on them would be better than the chance of a critical or ability to inflict a status.

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FFR: Solo Archer Part III

I won't be promoting or doing a promotion playthrough, so let's talk about what the Ranger would get. SCAVENGE can be used on a map screen at will. It will either do nothing, give materials from one of the monsters in the area, or start an encounter. If used after stepping on a spike, it will guaranteed a material the first time and start an encounter all subsequent times. It's kind of just there: doesn't really speed up the material grind. You can find the Yoichi Bow with it northwest of Gaia: 20/30/50 offenses. The Rose Bow bought in the same town has 25/35/30. It's crit gambling vs. power.

RAPID-FIRE is the limit: it deals four attacks to random enemies at max damage variance, and is unaffected by SLOW. Oh yes, since he hasn't been inflicted yet: SLOW drops an Archer's damage bonus from hit%. It used to make it impossible to hit, thankfully that got changed. Still not something they want to be hit by.

Then, fricking HUNTER'S MARK.


This SKILL can be used at will, every single turn, and will trigger at the start of a turn. Its effect? Every hit of the next physical attack will be critical. Here's the Icepick getting boosted by this effect. Monk's LIMIT skill is to do a physical where every hit to be critical. It's like having that available on-demand! Now, some abilities in FFR cannot be spammed, inflicting a special tiredness status that prevents skill use. These include the Lancer's JUMP, the Blue Wizard's CONVERGENCE, and the Time Wizard's DOUBLECAST - which notably didn't have it before.

HUNTER'S MARK? Has no tiredness. It can be used every single turn, and probably should be because the Ranger sucks on offense as discussed. Let me repeat and spell it out: this is like having a LIMIT - which in FFR are abilities you can use once per inn visit - available to use as often as you want. Sure, it's only the next physical that works, but the right party composition can solve this. Why this skill was not given tiredness when DOUBLECAST got rightfully nerfed is beyond me. It might even deserve two turns of tiredness: it's that crazy. My Ranger did nothing but spam this over and over once I got this in my casual, when not using spellcasting items. And on top of all that? You don't need a bow if you don't want one!

It's inefficient for a solo though, so I wouldn't use it even if doing a promoted run. There just isn't enough to justify it.


One thing I will miss out on though is this. Instead of buffing hit%, this scarf boosts crit%! Exclusive to promotion only, so I'll have to wait for the Sea Shrine to get the next one. I did pick up a ProRing though because I had the money.

It took three tries to make it through the Waterfall because COCTRICEs at the spike kept petrifying Yahata. But the Ribbon is, as always, a game changer. Now, the only danger was going to be death by numbers.

Going in and out of the upper level of the Sea Shrine was annoying because Yahata ran into three WzSAHAG/R.SAHAG sets. No Zeus, so I just sped things up while he whittled them down as they hit him for nothing. There would have been another knife here if I promoted, but not doing that as mentioned. Strangely, not as good as the Catclaw (you're trading 5 hit% for 0.5% crit and mech effectiveness), but may as well be plus it's free.


There was this, too. This boosts hit% even higher and gives a point of absorb.


I had Yahata gain some levels at the entrance of the Sea Shrine. The fights there went NAGA/maybe a WATER, a GrSHARK or two, and the same as the first. Paid out well and were easy. Then I went down. One nice thing about the Icepick is that it helped shred these things. More than it probably should have, but I wasn't complaining. Thankfully, there were no GHOSTs on the way down, so--


Oh you have GOT to be fricking kidding me. Well, nice try game. I switched the Silver Bow back on just in case this happened. I know better due to all the times I've gotten WarMECHed.

As a refresher: HADES is a new encounter found at the bottom of the Sea Shrine from the exit to the last room to the end. He's not part of the encounter table: he just has a 1% of showing up to kick your ass. He can use INFERNO, which Blue Mages can learn, as well as ABYSSAL DARK, which Geomancers can use and is a hard-hitting Poison-elemental attack. 800HP, 128 attack on 1 hit, and 60 absorb.


I should've really figured out if you can run, but instead I fought him. This guy is considered a spellcaster, meaning one THROAT SHOT and that was a guaranteed silence. I piled on by inflicting paralysis. And yeah, this is another place where bows can shine: Yahata was doing solid damage despite having only 36 attack.


He ultimately never got to do anything before dying. Now, do you want to try and show up too, robot? I mean the big problem is that this gave Yahata a level, but he rolled strength and it wasn't strong HP, so not a lot of harm done.


As for KRAKEN, a single TAIL SHOT reduced his infamous physical to nothing. Yahata beat the turn order, so beating the big monster from there was not a problem.

There was nothing to get in Mirage Tower or the Floating Castle for Yahata except the ProCape. Archers can surprisingly wear these! I generally prefer the extra absorb over a few points of extra damage, though I would prefer the Silk Scarf's crit boost if Yahata could wear it. That said, he was coming up on level 39, where he would have 160 hit%. Or, 6-hits with the Icepick.

The dungeon flew by. WarMECH knew what was good for it and stayed away, because I got there at like encounter 14. Thought about luring it out, but decided, nah.


I hit TIAMAT with some SCALE SHOTs on top of everything else for the fun of it. It really doesn't make enough of a difference, especially with Archer itself.


One last thing before heading into the final dungeon: my inventory screen. You can have so much in it that FFR gives you a second page to put things on! Though the only thing on the page was the WARP stone I picked up out of habit.

The going went smooth. Yahata did die once to EARTHs. I had him use the bow on the next time through the earth floor to counter them with paralysis. Naturally, I used the Icepick most of the time, but especially on the Water floor. He was able to tear through another group of WATERs as a result.


Most of the fiends were dealt with in the same way. THROAT SHOT the first and last, TAIL SHOT the last three, and even humiliate them with LEG SHOT. AIM and fire. Here's a lower roll; KARY and TIAMAT got hit for around 1200. LICH just got shot with no issue.

Because of how much of the Archer's skillset is tied to bows, I didn't bother with the Masmune. It was straight through TIAMAT and onto the final floor.


Now let's talk about CHAOS. As I've been mentioning, Final Fantasy Renaissance now gives certain enemies outright immunity to particular status ailments. You can see CHAOS' right there. In particular, he can't be silenced: this was newly introduced in the version that introduced Archer. So you can't just cheese him with THROAT SHOT and shut everything but his physicals off. You also can't confuse him, kill him with petrify (HEAD SHOT relevantly), instantly kill him in three turns from when you cast the spell (regular instant death is fine), or prevent him from running away. But you might notice the absence of something else.

Yes, that's right, you can LEG SHOT him. No magic defense, no resistance. If he loses the coinflip, he's toast. You might also notice Holy resistance there. That presently causes minor issues with White Wizard.


I won't be doing that. I started off with a TAIL SHOT to neuter his physical offense. Then Yahata wound back.


You can hold an AIM for as long as you want. It won't go beyond 360% effectiveness, but I could effectively have Yahata wait for CHAOS to cast CUR4. And because slow only affects an Archer's damage, that meant that even if SLO2 hit (which it didn't), it wouldn't have hurt him as bad as it would any other physical character.

He went through his spell progression reasonably quickly. Finally, the CUR4 did go off. I selected NEW and FIGHT+ to kick things off with--


Oh. All right then.

When I first did a casual, I had mixed feelings about the Archer class that settled on weak dislike, apathy at best. Now that I've played solo, I feel I dislike this one. Oddly because I enjoyed this for the most part, but it really highlighted the problems with the class compared to my casual experience.

Archer is a class of ridiculous highs and pathetic lows, and on the low end you have the class' offense as I've been mentioning. The biggest problem with it doesn't appear solo: when in a party setting, Archer is going to struggle to get kills before its allies do. Especially in a party with an offensive spellcaster. You have to slow down to make them work, which can be anything from a hassle to actively suicidal. They benefit a lot from FAST, but then, others benefit even more. Archers shine the most in parties that don't have much offense except them, and at that point, you're running a memetic party based around supporting them. But the payoff on the skills is good. Maybe too good.

And that's the other part of Archer's questionable design. LEG SHOT is nuts, one of the easiest to access, and can shut down any boss in the main game with nothing more than a winning coinflip. If this was later and inconvenient, sure. But HIDEs are fairly easy to obtain and it's a straight 50-50. At least with THROAT SHOT, the enemies can still sometimes do stuff and it's a unique niche against LICH. I've said enough about HUNTER'S MARK too. The class is either destroying things (mostly single targets) or it's just there. It's sort of like the Time Mage in that respect except not as fun.

Thanks for reading. This will be the last solo I do before new content in 2.2, which will introduce Ronin and Machinist.

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