FFMQ Low% Part III

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Despite Reuben returning, he was not the optimal character to grind whatever levels I needed remaining with, which turns out to be not a lot at all. With all my Seeds, I could just use magic. He has a White spell, but then again, so does Phoebe, and she's much better at using it. So I just went straight for Mac's Ship, though for some reason kept running into status-related issues along the way.


I did get B one extra level by grinding in Pazuzu's Tower - it was fairly easy to grind there on the first floor just by casting White on the Garudas, which would cleanly take them out each time. But after gaining said level, I ultimately decided to just go for Doom Castle. You can always back out and grind more, after all, and how Doom Castle is set up allows you to easily do so and jump right back in where you left off should you leave.


Skullrus Rex is not immune to petrification. Phoebe was killed rather quickly into this fight by Doom Dance (after being slept), but it didn't matter - the boss was instantly felled with one slash of the Dragon Claw, and his Shadow minions suffered the same fate soon thereafter. And this time in my challenge runs, I didn't suffer any embarrassment from him killing me. Beat him on the first try.


There's really not a lot to say about most of the regular fights. Phoebe was able to take most of them out with White, with support from B's Dragon Claw. One exception I learned came from the Cerberus enemies. These actually have a petrt-touch counter, instantly taking out B if he tried!

Oh, Stone Golem itself...this one was definitely annoying. You can't instantly defeat it with petrification or Life. While you can with Exit, that's not available to me. It was really annoying getting out of the gates and through the Cerberuses accompanying him - they could instantly kill B or Phoebe, and confusion was a factor in the fight as well. It was nothing some perserverance couldn't cover, but still. When Phoebe wasn't playing healer, she was unloading with White.


Twinhead Wyvern was probably the hardest boss of the gauntlet. Holding onto Kaeli's stats meant that Phoebe was vulnerable to paralysis, and this foiled several of my attempts at the fight before I was able to get one through.


Now Zuh...this was weird. I found that Phoebe's White's could randomly end up doing half-damage to it. I had no idea what was causing it at the time, but on asking those in the know it happens when you petrify an enemy in a battle - multi-target spells still consider it to be present for the purposes of calculating damage. I was using the Dragon Claw to potentially one-shot the Thanatos, and that was causing it.

Under normal circumstances they were doing 2129 when Zuh was alone, but when this bug/quirk was in play, they would do 1053. Very undesirable to say the least. I did it without knowing, simply repeating until it didn't happen, but had I known I would've beaten the Chimera first with the claw, with it being immune to petrification. White would've been able to one-shot the Thanatos from there.


As with the low level run, I was going into this while maintaining Kaeli's statistics and immunities, so Phoebe couldn't fall victim to petrification as well. Every little bit is going to count for Dark King. Also, this late in, I'd finally reached the point where Mega Grenades were outclassed as a basic attack. This could've come sooner with the Giant's Axe or Excalibur, but not in this variant.


Nevertheless, attacking normally against the Dark King was fruitless, so B spent nearly all of the battle doing what he did in the Cheerleader challenge - protecting Phoebe. Except this time I did have full control of her, so there was no need to worry about using turns on Seeds. All his HP plus not having to worry about the AI's incessant healing tenancies made sure this wasn't going to be as bad as that challenge in some respects

Still, it's not like this was going to be an easy fight. Despite that advantage of Phoebe not being able to be petrified, B was still very much vulnerable to everything, and she could still be confused. The strategy through the whole fight never changed, at least - B used defend on Phoebe, she attacked with White, healing and using Seeds as necessary. I did take one luck factor out, but the others were certai-


Wait, that's it? First try?

Okay then.

Well, this didn't turn out to be as bad as I thought, though a lot of it was the experience from the Cheerleader challenge coming into play. As I mentioned at the start, this was close in concept in how it played out - the main character wasn't relegated to support, but he was effectively only good for instantly killing things with the Dragon Claw and protecting his partner from damage by the end. The main difference is that I had full control of the partner character, which made a drastic difference in the difficulty. The Cheerleader has already shown that they're capable of carrying on their own, and when they're in the hands of the player rather than the finicky AI, their full power can be unleashed.

The hardest parts of this was the early game, particularly Bone Dungeon. I also needed to go through Ice Pyramid conservatively in order to not run out of magic. The extra stipulation I took of not opening regular treasure chests definitely played a part in the difficulty of those two. With Seeds I would've had extra Life charges for the Flamerus Rex fight, and I could've played with Phoebe's spells a bit more leading up to Ice Golem. Grinding definitely helped in Aquaria, though. Otherwise it could've been a repeat of the problems in Bone Dungeon.

I still have more ideas for variants of this game, so look forward to those someday.

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