FF1 WSC Iron Fists Part II
Nov. 10th, 2019 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirsystemerrorAll right, let's step back and think about this.
Attack buffing is a serious game-changer for this, way more than I expected going in. These Neo Iron Fists have gone from a team forced to win through defensive turtling to one that can simply pump it up and win. There's something else to consider about the White Mage as well, however: HEL2 got fixed. They're not quite as good as they used to be.
Given this and my own style, I expect I'll be able to clear the game at around level 30 - where the Fighters will get 4 hits - contrasted to Sullla going all the way to 50. Certainly, no later than 41, where they get 5 hits. Red Mage has 9/8/7/7/6/5/3/0 spells at 30, whereas monochrome have 9/8/7/7/6/6/5/4. But the short of this is Black Mage will only let me get in there slightly earlier, it ultimately won't matter in the end. They're still pretty much out - the only reason I'd take one is STUN, which is tempting for me, but I think I'd prefer access to the White spells at L6, which RW does get.
Giant's Gauntlets WILL be in-play here, allowing anyone to use them to buff. It can replace Temper. But it can't replace Haste. I would only have half as many with one, but with two I'd have a Haste for every boss in the last dungeon.
This is otherwise mostly an early game investment from me for once.
No difference with Garland. The second RM made it even easier, as I don't have a squishy liability to worry about. I still did a ship game grind. One thing I started doing in this runback as well: just running from enemies who could do poison. It's something that's dangerous enough to be healed in long battles now, but you ideally avoid those to begin with.
No difference with the Pirates either. I was ready for even more 15-tile puzzle after this. This time, I went ahead and did 12 first place completions of it, to get all I would need in the early game immediately.
This was rough and I had to fight two only, but I eventually made it through at level 4 again. I also tried to do strength resets for the Reds to see how that turns out.
Instead of messing with silence, this time I did go ahead and do the grind on the peninsula beforehand with the armor I already had, which was easier with two Temper casters. I got to level 9 for two hits and completely potatoed Astos. It wasn't that much slower up to this point either, with about 10 minutes of this from grinding ship game harder sooner.
I already had enough cash from the ship game to get all of the stuff - less spells than before and I'd definitely want the anti family for Lich, but no issue. With two reds level 10 would've technically been sufficient, but I went ahead and got 11 before the Earth Cave anyway. This time I did use Crescent Lake for it.
Vampire hit Powr hard, but they survived. He again tried to paralyze Tuff, but this time he was not affected. He went down iwthout incient. The only problem was running into an unusual amount of Wizards on the way back. Nothing dangerous, but did hold me up.
And I'm caught up. Due to knowing what I wanted now and the two Reds, I was going much faster. Could've been even faster if I didn't stop for fights along the way in Earth Cave. Worth noting, I was behind at Astos by about 20 minutes...but about 10 of them were from ship game.
There was nothing to note about my trip to the rod or back into Earth Cave. Again, I kept on running into Piscodemons. I actually buffed against some of them to make it go faster. It was also here that I realized that I'd forgotten to actually go and get the anti spells. Oh well. May as well give it a try without. It'll be fine! I'm sure of it! I made it to Lich.
Very quickly, things started going off the rails. He hit Powr with sleep at one point, disrupting my buffing. Then he landed a physical to paralyze Tuff, taking him out of the fight. His Sleepra hit everyone, and he even landed Hold on Whak! They didn't want to recover, so I was finished from there.
So what have I learned today? Two things! I could've indeed done it without the anti spells. Also, screw paralysis. Well now that I'm back out, I may as well go ahead and grab the anti spells now.
The first trip back into the cave ended because of stunning undead on the fourth floor. Man, no matter how much I play FF1, those enemies are always the worst part about the entire game. They can just give you a game over and there's nothing you can do about it. The second trip in was finnicky: I made it to the end, but AGAIN kept running into huge groups of Piscodemons. I have never ever seen them as often as I have here before. I decided to pop some uses of Temper when I ran into four of them a few times, just to kill them fast enough ro avoid taking damage.
Acel went first, getting up AIce before Lich could use the spell. It did pitiful damage as a result. I would get up the necessary offensive buff spells as well. Because of those Piscodemons, I had only three level 2 charges available. I used two on Tuff and one on Whak,
The Hold spell did land on Whak, but that aside, this went incredibly smoothly. Cura use kept my warriors' health high, and Tuff dealt fairly decent damage the whole way through. This was the most he dealt. Since Lich has 800HP in this version though, it was far longer than it would be on NES...that is, if TMPR worked on NES.
Whak eventually snapped out of his paralysis and landed the kill. Needless to say that was very different from how it turned out for Sullla on NES. Aside from the anti spells, the approach was completely different. Goes to show just how one small change in mechanics/a bugfix can entirely change the nature of a variant.
It's kinda almost normal now, but I'll keep going with this. It will be interesting to see how it turns out at the very end.
#################
The WSC version was the first that messed up the river encounters. Now you'll run into the enemies found only in the northern rivers even in the southern ones. Strange change/oversight. But it's not the worst change to this version.
I decided I'd reset any appearance of Piscodemons in the first room of the Ice Cave, just because fighting is slow and I didn't want to waste time. First attempt in proper ended courtesy of one of the most pissed off Dark Wizards (MAGE) I've ever seen. He got a preemptive with Fira, killed 3/4 people with Bane immediately after. What's that? You say they don't do that? Well, they do in this version! Instead of their first three spells being RUB, LIT3, FIR3, it's FIR3, BANE, LIT3.
So they can ambush you - and they have a fairly high rate of doing so, and just kill you on the second turn. Nothing you can do about it. It's incredibly dumb and I have no idea why they changed it to be this severe. In some ways, WSC/Origins is far harder than the original game!
Anyway doing this like I did in previous challenges. I ran from everything I could in the cave.
#2) Dead to Mindflayers. Well, that's at least expected from this place.
#3) Stunlocked and killed by the spike trap,
#4) All petrified in the first room by Cocatrices.
#5) An early death to Mindflayers.
#6) An early death to Mindflayers.
#7) Paralysis lock before the pit, Powr died so I decided to reset.
#8) Now this was just insulting. Powr made an incredibly lucky escape. Let's talk about the Eye a bit now. It too got its spells changed: it starts off with Thundara and goes into Hold from there, effectively starting partway through its original script. It also uses its STARE special to deal damage. It's much more tame.
And therefore it wasn't much of a threat.
Then the spike trap ambushed me, stunlocked everyone, and I never got another turn.
#9) Three mages with surprise round. Dead.
#10) Oh, it gets even worse than my eighth attempt: I had a Frost Wolf ambush on the way out fro beating the Eye. This took out half the team. Tuff died to a Mindflayer, and the lone Acel was petrified. Also Oswan sucks. It has a strict screenshot limit of 100 and so I have a big gap here.
#11) All petrified
#12) Four mage ambush
#13) All petrified
#14) Four mage ambush
#15) Acel died to a huge massive critical in the spike encounter. I pressed on anyway. Rushed too much with speedup and fell into the pit again??? Excuse me??????
#16) This one finally got through, but holy crap. Right here I had another undead stunlocking incident. Forget instant death, those encounters are easily the worst part of FF1 in my opinion. Amazingly I managed to escape from that eventually. My party looked like trash after it.
Getting to Ordeals was amusing. Don't seem to run into these things too often, yet I ran into two, and they forced resets each time. It was on the overworld though, so no big deal.
Ordeals itself went super smoothly. I barely saw anything, and ran from anything I did see. It's kind of the mentality I've been adopting with FF1 variants as of late, if you've noticed. I can do leveling on my own time. Run the dungeon straight through, so I don't end up wasting a ton of time in the event I get horribly killed by the boss. And in some of these variants the odds of that are quite high indeed.
One weird quirk, because of the layout change you need to fight (or run from) the spike where the Heal Staff is twice.
Nothing to say about the Zombie Dragon, either. Other than how Oswan is stupid: I somehow accidentally increased the frameskip. There's no option for it in the menu, and I don't know what I did, but I was thankfully able to fix it by opening the unaffected config file and saving.
I actually tried to clean this place out for once, but one of my warriors got squinted. I shrugged and decided to do some more 15 tile puzzle. This would get me the funds for what was left to buy.
This version of the game added a little cutscene before entering the Undersea Shrine. This really made things annoying, actually: I used it as my grind spot later, and seeing that every time I entered or exited got obnoxious. It's unskippable in this version.
I did some gathering after this, including getting the Aegis Shield and Dragon Armor which would go to Whak. I ran into a random Blue Dragon, which was kind of obnoxious. Amusingly the robot was right at the door in the waterfall so I could've skipped the spike, but of course I wanted the items in there too, so I had to fight them anyway.
I decided I'd do a bit of leveling before doing anything else after that. My goal was level 16 to give the Wizards two L5 charges.
So what from here? I decided on the volcano next. And damn is the flashing ever bad on this version of the game. Blue flashes on red, very eye-straining to say the least.
I probably should've made sure my potions were at full before heading in, but I had enough, which is what counts! I ignored everything in here. I'd very soon be getting better equipment anyway, or already had it. I tried using the healing items at one point, but that just didn't work out.
It took a while to land the confusion against Marilith, which I can use due to my changed up ruleset. And in this version of the game the status is fixed, meaning enemies will properly use their own physical attacks instead of Fire spells. She could actually dish out fairly decent damage.
Because Whak got blinded, I threw all the buff spells onto Tuff instead. He started belting out tons of damage, as expected.
However, it was Marilith herself who dealt the finishing blow.
Back into the Undersea Shrine. And here they are, the Giant's Gauntlets, aka the Power Gaunlets, in-play and functional in this version of the game. These cast Saber when used as an item, giving +16 to attack and accuracy by 10. The latter stacks with a character's own accuracy, increasing their number of hits as appropriate.
I got to employ them in the very next battle against a group of these idiots. Before I would have to use L2 charges to get these things down in a timely fashion. Now? I could buff up for free and get to killing from there. Here you can also see hitting three hits before actually getting to the level otherwise required for it
Kraken was a very strange fight, possibly the strangest I've ever had against the big octopus. At no point during it did he use Ink. But he mostly stuck to attacking the fighters, who were more than capable of taking his hits. I didn't get a chance to try and slow him until it was mostly too late, focusing on getting up the offensive buffs before that.
This was near the end of the fight, and the finishing blow. Whak here had used the Giant's Gauntlets once, and had Haste and four Tempers cast on him. The damage got out of control. These spells can really let their targets do some crazy stuff if you let them.
Next, I wanted to hit level 20. This would give the Red Wizards their first level 6 charges, and therefore access to Exit to loot the Sky Castle and make a straight shot through on the next trip. That meant it's time to go to grinding hell! See you on the other side!
Next | Index
Attack buffing is a serious game-changer for this, way more than I expected going in. These Neo Iron Fists have gone from a team forced to win through defensive turtling to one that can simply pump it up and win. There's something else to consider about the White Mage as well, however: HEL2 got fixed. They're not quite as good as they used to be.
Given this and my own style, I expect I'll be able to clear the game at around level 30 - where the Fighters will get 4 hits - contrasted to Sullla going all the way to 50. Certainly, no later than 41, where they get 5 hits. Red Mage has 9/8/7/7/6/5/3/0 spells at 30, whereas monochrome have 9/8/7/7/6/6/5/4. But the short of this is Black Mage will only let me get in there slightly earlier, it ultimately won't matter in the end. They're still pretty much out - the only reason I'd take one is STUN, which is tempting for me, but I think I'd prefer access to the White spells at L6, which RW does get.
Giant's Gauntlets WILL be in-play here, allowing anyone to use them to buff. It can replace Temper. But it can't replace Haste. I would only have half as many with one, but with two I'd have a Haste for every boss in the last dungeon.
This is otherwise mostly an early game investment from me for once.
No difference with Garland. The second RM made it even easier, as I don't have a squishy liability to worry about. I still did a ship game grind. One thing I started doing in this runback as well: just running from enemies who could do poison. It's something that's dangerous enough to be healed in long battles now, but you ideally avoid those to begin with.
No difference with the Pirates either. I was ready for even more 15-tile puzzle after this. This time, I went ahead and did 12 first place completions of it, to get all I would need in the early game immediately.
This was rough and I had to fight two only, but I eventually made it through at level 4 again. I also tried to do strength resets for the Reds to see how that turns out.
Instead of messing with silence, this time I did go ahead and do the grind on the peninsula beforehand with the armor I already had, which was easier with two Temper casters. I got to level 9 for two hits and completely potatoed Astos. It wasn't that much slower up to this point either, with about 10 minutes of this from grinding ship game harder sooner.
I already had enough cash from the ship game to get all of the stuff - less spells than before and I'd definitely want the anti family for Lich, but no issue. With two reds level 10 would've technically been sufficient, but I went ahead and got 11 before the Earth Cave anyway. This time I did use Crescent Lake for it.
Vampire hit Powr hard, but they survived. He again tried to paralyze Tuff, but this time he was not affected. He went down iwthout incient. The only problem was running into an unusual amount of Wizards on the way back. Nothing dangerous, but did hold me up.
And I'm caught up. Due to knowing what I wanted now and the two Reds, I was going much faster. Could've been even faster if I didn't stop for fights along the way in Earth Cave. Worth noting, I was behind at Astos by about 20 minutes...but about 10 of them were from ship game.
There was nothing to note about my trip to the rod or back into Earth Cave. Again, I kept on running into Piscodemons. I actually buffed against some of them to make it go faster. It was also here that I realized that I'd forgotten to actually go and get the anti spells. Oh well. May as well give it a try without. It'll be fine! I'm sure of it! I made it to Lich.
Very quickly, things started going off the rails. He hit Powr with sleep at one point, disrupting my buffing. Then he landed a physical to paralyze Tuff, taking him out of the fight. His Sleepra hit everyone, and he even landed Hold on Whak! They didn't want to recover, so I was finished from there.
So what have I learned today? Two things! I could've indeed done it without the anti spells. Also, screw paralysis. Well now that I'm back out, I may as well go ahead and grab the anti spells now.
The first trip back into the cave ended because of stunning undead on the fourth floor. Man, no matter how much I play FF1, those enemies are always the worst part about the entire game. They can just give you a game over and there's nothing you can do about it. The second trip in was finnicky: I made it to the end, but AGAIN kept running into huge groups of Piscodemons. I have never ever seen them as often as I have here before. I decided to pop some uses of Temper when I ran into four of them a few times, just to kill them fast enough ro avoid taking damage.
Acel went first, getting up AIce before Lich could use the spell. It did pitiful damage as a result. I would get up the necessary offensive buff spells as well. Because of those Piscodemons, I had only three level 2 charges available. I used two on Tuff and one on Whak,
The Hold spell did land on Whak, but that aside, this went incredibly smoothly. Cura use kept my warriors' health high, and Tuff dealt fairly decent damage the whole way through. This was the most he dealt. Since Lich has 800HP in this version though, it was far longer than it would be on NES...that is, if TMPR worked on NES.
Whak eventually snapped out of his paralysis and landed the kill. Needless to say that was very different from how it turned out for Sullla on NES. Aside from the anti spells, the approach was completely different. Goes to show just how one small change in mechanics/a bugfix can entirely change the nature of a variant.
It's kinda almost normal now, but I'll keep going with this. It will be interesting to see how it turns out at the very end.
#################
The WSC version was the first that messed up the river encounters. Now you'll run into the enemies found only in the northern rivers even in the southern ones. Strange change/oversight. But it's not the worst change to this version.
I decided I'd reset any appearance of Piscodemons in the first room of the Ice Cave, just because fighting is slow and I didn't want to waste time. First attempt in proper ended courtesy of one of the most pissed off Dark Wizards (MAGE) I've ever seen. He got a preemptive with Fira, killed 3/4 people with Bane immediately after. What's that? You say they don't do that? Well, they do in this version! Instead of their first three spells being RUB, LIT3, FIR3, it's FIR3, BANE, LIT3.
So they can ambush you - and they have a fairly high rate of doing so, and just kill you on the second turn. Nothing you can do about it. It's incredibly dumb and I have no idea why they changed it to be this severe. In some ways, WSC/Origins is far harder than the original game!
Anyway doing this like I did in previous challenges. I ran from everything I could in the cave.
#2) Dead to Mindflayers. Well, that's at least expected from this place.
#3) Stunlocked and killed by the spike trap,
#4) All petrified in the first room by Cocatrices.
#5) An early death to Mindflayers.
#6) An early death to Mindflayers.
#7) Paralysis lock before the pit, Powr died so I decided to reset.
#8) Now this was just insulting. Powr made an incredibly lucky escape. Let's talk about the Eye a bit now. It too got its spells changed: it starts off with Thundara and goes into Hold from there, effectively starting partway through its original script. It also uses its STARE special to deal damage. It's much more tame.
And therefore it wasn't much of a threat.
Then the spike trap ambushed me, stunlocked everyone, and I never got another turn.
#9) Three mages with surprise round. Dead.
#10) Oh, it gets even worse than my eighth attempt: I had a Frost Wolf ambush on the way out fro beating the Eye. This took out half the team. Tuff died to a Mindflayer, and the lone Acel was petrified. Also Oswan sucks. It has a strict screenshot limit of 100 and so I have a big gap here.
#11) All petrified
#12) Four mage ambush
#13) All petrified
#14) Four mage ambush
#15) Acel died to a huge massive critical in the spike encounter. I pressed on anyway. Rushed too much with speedup and fell into the pit again??? Excuse me??????
#16) This one finally got through, but holy crap. Right here I had another undead stunlocking incident. Forget instant death, those encounters are easily the worst part of FF1 in my opinion. Amazingly I managed to escape from that eventually. My party looked like trash after it.
Getting to Ordeals was amusing. Don't seem to run into these things too often, yet I ran into two, and they forced resets each time. It was on the overworld though, so no big deal.
Ordeals itself went super smoothly. I barely saw anything, and ran from anything I did see. It's kind of the mentality I've been adopting with FF1 variants as of late, if you've noticed. I can do leveling on my own time. Run the dungeon straight through, so I don't end up wasting a ton of time in the event I get horribly killed by the boss. And in some of these variants the odds of that are quite high indeed.
One weird quirk, because of the layout change you need to fight (or run from) the spike where the Heal Staff is twice.
Nothing to say about the Zombie Dragon, either. Other than how Oswan is stupid: I somehow accidentally increased the frameskip. There's no option for it in the menu, and I don't know what I did, but I was thankfully able to fix it by opening the unaffected config file and saving.
I actually tried to clean this place out for once, but one of my warriors got squinted. I shrugged and decided to do some more 15 tile puzzle. This would get me the funds for what was left to buy.
This version of the game added a little cutscene before entering the Undersea Shrine. This really made things annoying, actually: I used it as my grind spot later, and seeing that every time I entered or exited got obnoxious. It's unskippable in this version.
I did some gathering after this, including getting the Aegis Shield and Dragon Armor which would go to Whak. I ran into a random Blue Dragon, which was kind of obnoxious. Amusingly the robot was right at the door in the waterfall so I could've skipped the spike, but of course I wanted the items in there too, so I had to fight them anyway.
I decided I'd do a bit of leveling before doing anything else after that. My goal was level 16 to give the Wizards two L5 charges.
So what from here? I decided on the volcano next. And damn is the flashing ever bad on this version of the game. Blue flashes on red, very eye-straining to say the least.
I probably should've made sure my potions were at full before heading in, but I had enough, which is what counts! I ignored everything in here. I'd very soon be getting better equipment anyway, or already had it. I tried using the healing items at one point, but that just didn't work out.
It took a while to land the confusion against Marilith, which I can use due to my changed up ruleset. And in this version of the game the status is fixed, meaning enemies will properly use their own physical attacks instead of Fire spells. She could actually dish out fairly decent damage.
Because Whak got blinded, I threw all the buff spells onto Tuff instead. He started belting out tons of damage, as expected.
However, it was Marilith herself who dealt the finishing blow.
Back into the Undersea Shrine. And here they are, the Giant's Gauntlets, aka the Power Gaunlets, in-play and functional in this version of the game. These cast Saber when used as an item, giving +16 to attack and accuracy by 10. The latter stacks with a character's own accuracy, increasing their number of hits as appropriate.
I got to employ them in the very next battle against a group of these idiots. Before I would have to use L2 charges to get these things down in a timely fashion. Now? I could buff up for free and get to killing from there. Here you can also see hitting three hits before actually getting to the level otherwise required for it
Kraken was a very strange fight, possibly the strangest I've ever had against the big octopus. At no point during it did he use Ink. But he mostly stuck to attacking the fighters, who were more than capable of taking his hits. I didn't get a chance to try and slow him until it was mostly too late, focusing on getting up the offensive buffs before that.
This was near the end of the fight, and the finishing blow. Whak here had used the Giant's Gauntlets once, and had Haste and four Tempers cast on him. The damage got out of control. These spells can really let their targets do some crazy stuff if you let them.
Next, I wanted to hit level 20. This would give the Red Wizards their first level 6 charges, and therefore access to Exit to loot the Sky Castle and make a straight shot through on the next trip. That meant it's time to go to grinding hell! See you on the other side!
Next | Index
