FFR: DRK/BLU/TRA/BRD playthrough Part II
Nov. 5th, 2023 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirsystemerrorAs before, Class Change in FFR brought a lot more than just changing the equipment and spells a class was able to learn. Here's what each of my four classes got.
Deathknight
- Gained the SOULEATER command. Uses 20% of maxHP to deal AoE NE damage to all enemies based on HP sacrificed as well as inflicting blind. Heals undead and inflicts Fatigued. Pretty cool sounding.
- Gained the CONSUME BAT world ability. This allows them to destroy any bat and gain a stat increase. Every map's bats gave the same stat buff, and even the Sky Warriors could be eaten. I wavered on whether or not to do this since it seemed completely ridiculous.
- Their LIMIT is DREADSPIKES. It drains a percentage of HP (not specifying how much) from melee attackers, wearing off after 50% of the user's maxHP had been drained. I'd have to see this one in practice to judge.
Beastmaster
- Gained the CATCH and CALL BEAST commands. The former lets them capture a monster, and the latter releases it into a battle - space on the battlefield permitting.
- Their LIMIT is FAMILIAR, guaranteeing success with the next CONTROL attempt. Given the odds of success are high to begin with and it takes a turn, this one didn't sound too great unless it worked on WarMECH or something. Maybe made for a low-level challenge?
Blue Wizard
- Gained the CONVERGENCE command, making an AoE spell single target and doubling its base damage, while also inflicting Fatigued on the user. Now here was a good one! I wasn't sure if it applied to status spells in some way too.
- LIMIT was AZURE AFFINITY, doubling the accuracy of the next Blue Magic spell cast and increasing the odds of learning a Blue spell to 100% until then. There were only 4 spells left for Bluto to learn, so this was mostly for the first part.
Troubadour
- Gained an extra spell charge!
- Gained BARDSONG L2 and ENCORE. The former was just to indicate the above, the latter just indicates that HIDE could restore the additional spell charge.
- LIMIT was VIRTUOSO, allowing a song to be played on use of the command and allowed identical ones to stack together. Sounds like a thing for boss battles.
I went to the man in front of the inn in Coneria to check out the sidequests available for each job. Talking to Sara and the Elf Prince gave me the Auto Harp and Dream Harp respectively. The former would start each battle by activating a random song. The latter played a LULLABY at the start of each fight. Sleep is useless by this point since enemies would wake up right away, but it could make them miss a turn. I decided I'd give both a try and see what I liked better. They would still active on an ambush too after the enemies moved. There was also a guy in Gaia who had peculiarly changed dialogue when speaking to him with a Bard, but did nothing else. Talking as a Troubadour did nothing either; I suspected that would change if I mastered all the songs. Ozmo wouldn't lock the Gilbart Harp behind Thief, right? Right??? I swear I am going on a rant if it is.
Blue Wizard's just hinted at the location of some of the ultimate spells. Top of the world and bottom of the ocean. Beastmaster directed me to a man in Gaia who sold food for monsters. Deathknight spoke of a guy who likes to hang around graveyards and has a fascination with death. Luckily, I knew exactly where to go thanks to a Bard song conversation: Onrac.
The guy challenged me to take 1000 damage in a battle without dying. Should be simple enough to pull that off, just a massive slog. I took off his armor, got in a fight with a Saber T outside, and let it wail on him. I had Barbra hiding and singing Angelsong, while using DRINK and the Heal Staff with the others. Helpfully, the game gave me a notification once the damage threshold was reached - wasn't expecting it so I missed it popping up. The reward for this was Darius gaining the MISERY trait, increasing his damage the lower his HP. High-risk high-reward style, huh? And it sounded like it would go great with SOULEATER. Interesting.
Then there was this. Great.
T REX is one of the game's 1/64 encounters, and along with IronGOL, one of two who are exclusive to the rarest encounter slot (WarMECH is a 3/64). It can be found all over the northern continents. It's not that uncommon to bump into one out of the blue, but now for the first time in playing FF1 I had to hunt for one.
I landed in the woods near Lefein, put Tracy in the front of the party to save on some button presses, saved the game with a TENT, and got to resetting a lot.
It eventually appeared. I got ready to CATCH it: T REX has 600HP, which would be restored to full on capture but I was cautious when weakening it anyway and only had Darius attack. Then I was surprised when Tracy just caught it at full HP. You go girl!
The reward was unlocking monster food in the shops around the world. There were six in total, one for each town with an item shop. They all boosted one of a monster's stats for one battle. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any for boosting HP: unless it got restored at an inn, it seemed captured monsters, while reusable, would slowly lose HP until they die.
With all that out of the way, I could finally start tackling dungeons again. The Waterfall was the logical place to start. If I was abusing CONSUME BAT, Darius could've gotten a big chunk of VIT from the ones here. I had chosen not to use it in any way shape or form. I checked every nook and cranny, but there was no Blue Magic teacher here either. But there was of course, the equipment. It was very disappointing to see that Blue Wizard can't equip Defense, despite otherwise matching Red's equipment thus far. Besides the obligatory Ribbon, there was also new equipment.
The Control Whip was 20/20/1 and said it controlled monsters? No indication as to what that means. The in-battle description said it did inflict CONTROL on hit but I only learned this later. It was weaker than the axes. There was the Water Armlet; some vanilla FF1 things have been given this new element (like SWIRL) but it's still rare. Finally, the Coral Greatsword: 50/-15/10, effective on aquatic.
Darius now had enough hit% so this would only take him down to 2 hits. But number of hits is far more potent. As some numerical exampling, let's compare both vs. BADMAN, which has 38 defense (way more than most enemies).
Attack = Weapon Attack + STR/2
Damage = A...2A - D
Current stats worked him out to 50 and 65 respectively. Assuming all hits connect, Bastard would result in 36-186 damage. Coral would be 54-184. Higher floor, but mostly the same ceiling. But those are on the high end of enemy absorb. What if it's against something with 10? Bastard would hit for 120-270, Coral for 110-240. Things get shakier if swings start to miss or if critical hits come into play. For now, however, it didn't feel worth it. A miss was way worse with Coral than it was with Bastard.
I cleared out the upper floor of the Sea Shrine first, naturally. I've only been mentioning it sometimes, but some of the Bard dialogue is absolutely nuts. Findwise, two of the Mermaids got me two more song of celebration components. There was of course the Mage Staff. Unfortunately, Dark Knight could not use the Opal equipment. Still no Blue Magic, but one of the mermaids spoke of a damned one that guarded the path to KRAKEN. That sounded like it was time to back out and do Sky Castle first.
Lefein got me another celebration component and the usual CHIME. I picked up Darius' unique L8 spell while I was here, EN-DARK. When cast, it gave his attacks the Death element and a chance to KO. The former aspect is actually pointless: only some FFR exclusives like CARBUNCLE are weak to it, so it functionally is just so that the KO aspect has an element attached to it. Otherwise, it'd be like a SORCERER's and could kill anything.
The first floor of Mirage Tower gave me a Beast Sword. Tracy and more importantly Bluto could use this weapon which did additional damage to beasts. It was a point stronger and had 5 more hit% than the Ice Sword, so it was an upgrade. Bluto could also use the Sun Sword, so the Beast Sword went to Tracy since it was stronger than her axes. Speaking of her, she could equip the Dragon Armor! That is really sick, and I actually had her do so over Darius. Thor went to Barbra who passed the Mage Staff to Tracy. One of the robots also finished the L8 song, VICTORY MARCH. It doubled experience gain. It took me a few Blue D fights before it used THUNDER.
I remembered SOULEATER exists at around this point. It did nice damage, more than good enough for my tastes, but I was worried about my HEAL count. So I didn't end up using it much more. The first floor of the Sky Castle had plenty of things for Tracy. The Wyrm Helmet and Wyrm Gauntlet below with the Bane Sword both had 10 absorb. With the Dragon Armor, she actually became my bulkiest team member, so she went to the fore. A Golden Axe was on the left. 32/35/3. Better than the Beast Sword. The Buster Sword (?!) was in the eight-pointed room. 60/-20/10. It did enough damage that I felt it was better to switch over. A better one might be coming later though: depends on if it's really locked behind Thief or not.
When I switched to the Auto Harp here, I discovered that you could stack songs. Yeah, somehow didn't ever try until now. You can't play multiple of the same at once without LIMIT, but you can play up to four at once. And Auto Harp let you do it more easily. Yeah, this one is certainly better. The Dream Harp had many problems: inaccuracy, time wasting, and enemies being able to move immediately if hit while asleep chief among them.
Of course, the ultimate Blue Magic spell was here. I was reluctant to go for it now, though. I had 3 HEALs left by the time I reached TIAMAT. I gave it one BANE and she dropped dead. Forgot CONVERGENCE existed for a moment heh.
I used the prior method of a hard reset before hunting the robot. I had Bluto use his LIMIT to guarantee a successful learning of NUCLEAR. I was ready for a kaiju battle, but T REX did very little damage. So I threw out a GLARE for kicks and it actually instantly killed the robot - it is not immune to the Time element. And I guess AZURE AFFINITY boosted the odds of it hitting. Only problem? It didn't get a chance to use NUCLEAR! Oops. I left and returned. Again, I was able to instantly destroy it with GLARE, and again, one of my party members went down (Tracy this time). But this time, I left with the big bad spell: 160 base damage to one foe. Worse than NUKE, but it could be focused...
Kraken went well: CONVERGENCE THUNDER and a strong hit from Darius ended it. I tried to throw out T REX, and all it got a chance to do was take a hit from KRAKEN. There was no sign of that damned one, however. When reentering and combing the bottom floor again, I couldn't find any NPC. So I thought, maybe a random encounter? I put Tracy to work.
It eventually showed. HADES used something called ABYSSAL DARK throughout the battle. This was a new skill that just did damage in some element, probably death elemental from how little it was doing to everyone (who either had a ProRing or a Ribbon). Logically, it should be the one, right? A cool new ultimate spell, original content, do not steal? No. Alas, no. Just to make this even stupider, I had to stall until it cast the real thing. The White Shirt helped with this, and you better believe I was DRINKing a lot with Angelsong up. Heal Staff was on Barbra for some reason though.
The real point was INFERNO, which it sure took its time in casting. Yeah, it's total bait: even if you find this enemy, unless you know that's the actual skill, you could just kill it before it uses it. Normally CHAOS-exclusive and fire-elemental just in case you thought there weren't enough AoE fire skills in the Blue Mage's repertoire. It was the hardest-hitting skill in the game by raw numbers: 192 base power.
Only thing left was to find the last component of the L7 song. I wracked my brain until I thought, maybe the robot in the waterfall? That was it. DEXTROUS ETUDE (sic) increased critical hit chance by 15%. Very nice!
Unfortunately, it seemed I wouldn't be getting the Gilbart Harp after all. The guy in Gaia still had nothing interesting to say. Okay. Why the FUCK would you make something Thief-exclusive? Especially something like that! It has the usual whatever stats, but it autoplays VICTORY MARCH! Thank you for listening to my rant. Speaking of which, there would have been another at the very entrance of the ToFR for Darius: the Chaos Sword. 40/-10/5. Not as big a loss, but the point still remains. It's nice to give actual exclusive purpose to the Thief, but locking out content entirely doesn't seem right.
The early goings were very bland, but bland is good. It means you aren't running into anything annoying. FFR adds nothing to the ToFR besides what Thief can dig up. The encounters played nice. PHANTOM was easy, and both LICH and KARY were killed by GLARE simply because I was able to do so.
Then, KRAKEN suddenly instantly gibbed Darius! He was at max HP, so this was just a case of the game flipping me off all of a sudden. I beat him from there with a SQUINT (trying to got 3/3 with GLARE had failed the first turn), but this was suddenly looking a little dubious. Well, the Masmune was originally going to go to Darius, so instead I gave it to Tracy. She had a little less STR and hit%, but Bluto could use spells so that just left her.
Then out of the blue on the way back from picking it up, IronGOL showed. Well, I wasn't planning on this - LURE wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was, and it wouldn't save anyway (no EXIT or portal out of the temple), and there's almost no use for it. Anyway, it's here, so say hello to the wielder of the final Blue Magic skill in the game. Yeah. You probably don't know about TOXIC unless you're a hardcore FF1 enthusiast who likes studying trivia. Not only is this on a 1/64 monster, they also only ever use it at 1/8 odds per turn. They can hit decently hard but they're certainly not going to last more than a few rounds even with their resistances to everything but time and 100 DEF. 304HP is not a lot.
I used the White Shirt until I had enough stacks, then sat back using equipment ineffectively until it used the skill - I had AZURE AFFINITY on idle standby without using a Blue spell, not sure if it needed to be used on the turn the spell was used (which would be even worse design), but I learned it whether it did or not. TOXIC is too little too late for the Blue Mage. Even if you have a way out of the temple from there.
Then things got really ugly when SORCERERs showed up, the 3/64 on the floor. There were a couple spots on the encounter table where this could happen where the 7 shortly follows the 8. I HERO'S RIMEd and got out, but not before they got Tracy. Two warriors left. Never give up! Never surrender! Pressing on was all I could do at this point. I wasn't about to redo the temple unless I lost. At the very least, it made things a little exciting. I passed the strong equipment around and pressed on. TIAMAT was something of a slog, but she couldn't do anything to threaten me either.
The burning question was, would one attacker be enough for CHAOS? Here's what Bluto's stats looked like before heading in. I was thinking maybe since Bard is here. Only one way to find out.
Round 1 started well enough: the Auto Harp first used MANA'S PAEON. Would've prefered ANGELSONG, but that's nice too. Barbra followed up with DEXTROUS ETUDE and Bluto hit for 459, 2 criticals. CHAOS used CRACK. Barbra followed with VALOR MINUET, ICE3 did 68/40, and Bluto did 322. So far, so good.
CHAOS next used a physical on Bluto for 196. Not what I wanted to see. Barbra popped her LIMIT to give another stack of crit boosting. Bluto then hit for 730! I tried a CONVERGENCE NUCLEAR next turn which did around 442. CHAOS used LIT3, but he was almost finished. Only another physical on Bluto would end me - I didn't have confidence that Barbra would be able to salvage things on her own.
Nope. It was a weak last hit, but it was enough.
All in all, I liked this grouping of jobs. It managed to be a relatively well-balanced party that could do a lot of things, especially killing things instantly. I also got very high level without really trying, heh. All that bonus experience added up over time. Blue Mage was ironically the most disappointing for being the one I was looking forward to the most, but it fell within expectations. Bard was nicely balanced, Dark Knight somehow barely made the gimmick work, and Trainer was a fun mini Fighter with a gimmick.
Next up will be two challenge-ish playthroughs making use of magic and physical classes respectively. Those should be interesting! Look forward to seeing those reports soon.
Index
Deathknight
- Gained the SOULEATER command. Uses 20% of maxHP to deal AoE NE damage to all enemies based on HP sacrificed as well as inflicting blind. Heals undead and inflicts Fatigued. Pretty cool sounding.
- Gained the CONSUME BAT world ability. This allows them to destroy any bat and gain a stat increase. Every map's bats gave the same stat buff, and even the Sky Warriors could be eaten. I wavered on whether or not to do this since it seemed completely ridiculous.
- Their LIMIT is DREADSPIKES. It drains a percentage of HP (not specifying how much) from melee attackers, wearing off after 50% of the user's maxHP had been drained. I'd have to see this one in practice to judge.
Beastmaster
- Gained the CATCH and CALL BEAST commands. The former lets them capture a monster, and the latter releases it into a battle - space on the battlefield permitting.
- Their LIMIT is FAMILIAR, guaranteeing success with the next CONTROL attempt. Given the odds of success are high to begin with and it takes a turn, this one didn't sound too great unless it worked on WarMECH or something. Maybe made for a low-level challenge?
Blue Wizard
- Gained the CONVERGENCE command, making an AoE spell single target and doubling its base damage, while also inflicting Fatigued on the user. Now here was a good one! I wasn't sure if it applied to status spells in some way too.
- LIMIT was AZURE AFFINITY, doubling the accuracy of the next Blue Magic spell cast and increasing the odds of learning a Blue spell to 100% until then. There were only 4 spells left for Bluto to learn, so this was mostly for the first part.
Troubadour
- Gained an extra spell charge!
- Gained BARDSONG L2 and ENCORE. The former was just to indicate the above, the latter just indicates that HIDE could restore the additional spell charge.
- LIMIT was VIRTUOSO, allowing a song to be played on use of the command and allowed identical ones to stack together. Sounds like a thing for boss battles.
I went to the man in front of the inn in Coneria to check out the sidequests available for each job. Talking to Sara and the Elf Prince gave me the Auto Harp and Dream Harp respectively. The former would start each battle by activating a random song. The latter played a LULLABY at the start of each fight. Sleep is useless by this point since enemies would wake up right away, but it could make them miss a turn. I decided I'd give both a try and see what I liked better. They would still active on an ambush too after the enemies moved. There was also a guy in Gaia who had peculiarly changed dialogue when speaking to him with a Bard, but did nothing else. Talking as a Troubadour did nothing either; I suspected that would change if I mastered all the songs. Ozmo wouldn't lock the Gilbart Harp behind Thief, right? Right??? I swear I am going on a rant if it is.
Blue Wizard's just hinted at the location of some of the ultimate spells. Top of the world and bottom of the ocean. Beastmaster directed me to a man in Gaia who sold food for monsters. Deathknight spoke of a guy who likes to hang around graveyards and has a fascination with death. Luckily, I knew exactly where to go thanks to a Bard song conversation: Onrac.
The guy challenged me to take 1000 damage in a battle without dying. Should be simple enough to pull that off, just a massive slog. I took off his armor, got in a fight with a Saber T outside, and let it wail on him. I had Barbra hiding and singing Angelsong, while using DRINK and the Heal Staff with the others. Helpfully, the game gave me a notification once the damage threshold was reached - wasn't expecting it so I missed it popping up. The reward for this was Darius gaining the MISERY trait, increasing his damage the lower his HP. High-risk high-reward style, huh? And it sounded like it would go great with SOULEATER. Interesting.
Then there was this. Great.
T REX is one of the game's 1/64 encounters, and along with IronGOL, one of two who are exclusive to the rarest encounter slot (WarMECH is a 3/64). It can be found all over the northern continents. It's not that uncommon to bump into one out of the blue, but now for the first time in playing FF1 I had to hunt for one.
I landed in the woods near Lefein, put Tracy in the front of the party to save on some button presses, saved the game with a TENT, and got to resetting a lot.
It eventually appeared. I got ready to CATCH it: T REX has 600HP, which would be restored to full on capture but I was cautious when weakening it anyway and only had Darius attack. Then I was surprised when Tracy just caught it at full HP. You go girl!
The reward was unlocking monster food in the shops around the world. There were six in total, one for each town with an item shop. They all boosted one of a monster's stats for one battle. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any for boosting HP: unless it got restored at an inn, it seemed captured monsters, while reusable, would slowly lose HP until they die.
With all that out of the way, I could finally start tackling dungeons again. The Waterfall was the logical place to start. If I was abusing CONSUME BAT, Darius could've gotten a big chunk of VIT from the ones here. I had chosen not to use it in any way shape or form. I checked every nook and cranny, but there was no Blue Magic teacher here either. But there was of course, the equipment. It was very disappointing to see that Blue Wizard can't equip Defense, despite otherwise matching Red's equipment thus far. Besides the obligatory Ribbon, there was also new equipment.
The Control Whip was 20/20/1 and said it controlled monsters? No indication as to what that means. The in-battle description said it did inflict CONTROL on hit but I only learned this later. It was weaker than the axes. There was the Water Armlet; some vanilla FF1 things have been given this new element (like SWIRL) but it's still rare. Finally, the Coral Greatsword: 50/-15/10, effective on aquatic.
Darius now had enough hit% so this would only take him down to 2 hits. But number of hits is far more potent. As some numerical exampling, let's compare both vs. BADMAN, which has 38 defense (way more than most enemies).
Attack = Weapon Attack + STR/2
Damage = A...2A - D
Current stats worked him out to 50 and 65 respectively. Assuming all hits connect, Bastard would result in 36-186 damage. Coral would be 54-184. Higher floor, but mostly the same ceiling. But those are on the high end of enemy absorb. What if it's against something with 10? Bastard would hit for 120-270, Coral for 110-240. Things get shakier if swings start to miss or if critical hits come into play. For now, however, it didn't feel worth it. A miss was way worse with Coral than it was with Bastard.
I cleared out the upper floor of the Sea Shrine first, naturally. I've only been mentioning it sometimes, but some of the Bard dialogue is absolutely nuts. Findwise, two of the Mermaids got me two more song of celebration components. There was of course the Mage Staff. Unfortunately, Dark Knight could not use the Opal equipment. Still no Blue Magic, but one of the mermaids spoke of a damned one that guarded the path to KRAKEN. That sounded like it was time to back out and do Sky Castle first.
Lefein got me another celebration component and the usual CHIME. I picked up Darius' unique L8 spell while I was here, EN-DARK. When cast, it gave his attacks the Death element and a chance to KO. The former aspect is actually pointless: only some FFR exclusives like CARBUNCLE are weak to it, so it functionally is just so that the KO aspect has an element attached to it. Otherwise, it'd be like a SORCERER's and could kill anything.
The first floor of Mirage Tower gave me a Beast Sword. Tracy and more importantly Bluto could use this weapon which did additional damage to beasts. It was a point stronger and had 5 more hit% than the Ice Sword, so it was an upgrade. Bluto could also use the Sun Sword, so the Beast Sword went to Tracy since it was stronger than her axes. Speaking of her, she could equip the Dragon Armor! That is really sick, and I actually had her do so over Darius. Thor went to Barbra who passed the Mage Staff to Tracy. One of the robots also finished the L8 song, VICTORY MARCH. It doubled experience gain. It took me a few Blue D fights before it used THUNDER.
I remembered SOULEATER exists at around this point. It did nice damage, more than good enough for my tastes, but I was worried about my HEAL count. So I didn't end up using it much more. The first floor of the Sky Castle had plenty of things for Tracy. The Wyrm Helmet and Wyrm Gauntlet below with the Bane Sword both had 10 absorb. With the Dragon Armor, she actually became my bulkiest team member, so she went to the fore. A Golden Axe was on the left. 32/35/3. Better than the Beast Sword. The Buster Sword (?!) was in the eight-pointed room. 60/-20/10. It did enough damage that I felt it was better to switch over. A better one might be coming later though: depends on if it's really locked behind Thief or not.
When I switched to the Auto Harp here, I discovered that you could stack songs. Yeah, somehow didn't ever try until now. You can't play multiple of the same at once without LIMIT, but you can play up to four at once. And Auto Harp let you do it more easily. Yeah, this one is certainly better. The Dream Harp had many problems: inaccuracy, time wasting, and enemies being able to move immediately if hit while asleep chief among them.
Of course, the ultimate Blue Magic spell was here. I was reluctant to go for it now, though. I had 3 HEALs left by the time I reached TIAMAT. I gave it one BANE and she dropped dead. Forgot CONVERGENCE existed for a moment heh.
I used the prior method of a hard reset before hunting the robot. I had Bluto use his LIMIT to guarantee a successful learning of NUCLEAR. I was ready for a kaiju battle, but T REX did very little damage. So I threw out a GLARE for kicks and it actually instantly killed the robot - it is not immune to the Time element. And I guess AZURE AFFINITY boosted the odds of it hitting. Only problem? It didn't get a chance to use NUCLEAR! Oops. I left and returned. Again, I was able to instantly destroy it with GLARE, and again, one of my party members went down (Tracy this time). But this time, I left with the big bad spell: 160 base damage to one foe. Worse than NUKE, but it could be focused...
Kraken went well: CONVERGENCE THUNDER and a strong hit from Darius ended it. I tried to throw out T REX, and all it got a chance to do was take a hit from KRAKEN. There was no sign of that damned one, however. When reentering and combing the bottom floor again, I couldn't find any NPC. So I thought, maybe a random encounter? I put Tracy to work.
It eventually showed. HADES used something called ABYSSAL DARK throughout the battle. This was a new skill that just did damage in some element, probably death elemental from how little it was doing to everyone (who either had a ProRing or a Ribbon). Logically, it should be the one, right? A cool new ultimate spell, original content, do not steal? No. Alas, no. Just to make this even stupider, I had to stall until it cast the real thing. The White Shirt helped with this, and you better believe I was DRINKing a lot with Angelsong up. Heal Staff was on Barbra for some reason though.
The real point was INFERNO, which it sure took its time in casting. Yeah, it's total bait: even if you find this enemy, unless you know that's the actual skill, you could just kill it before it uses it. Normally CHAOS-exclusive and fire-elemental just in case you thought there weren't enough AoE fire skills in the Blue Mage's repertoire. It was the hardest-hitting skill in the game by raw numbers: 192 base power.
Only thing left was to find the last component of the L7 song. I wracked my brain until I thought, maybe the robot in the waterfall? That was it. DEXTROUS ETUDE (sic) increased critical hit chance by 15%. Very nice!
Unfortunately, it seemed I wouldn't be getting the Gilbart Harp after all. The guy in Gaia still had nothing interesting to say. Okay. Why the FUCK would you make something Thief-exclusive? Especially something like that! It has the usual whatever stats, but it autoplays VICTORY MARCH! Thank you for listening to my rant. Speaking of which, there would have been another at the very entrance of the ToFR for Darius: the Chaos Sword. 40/-10/5. Not as big a loss, but the point still remains. It's nice to give actual exclusive purpose to the Thief, but locking out content entirely doesn't seem right.
The early goings were very bland, but bland is good. It means you aren't running into anything annoying. FFR adds nothing to the ToFR besides what Thief can dig up. The encounters played nice. PHANTOM was easy, and both LICH and KARY were killed by GLARE simply because I was able to do so.
Then, KRAKEN suddenly instantly gibbed Darius! He was at max HP, so this was just a case of the game flipping me off all of a sudden. I beat him from there with a SQUINT (trying to got 3/3 with GLARE had failed the first turn), but this was suddenly looking a little dubious. Well, the Masmune was originally going to go to Darius, so instead I gave it to Tracy. She had a little less STR and hit%, but Bluto could use spells so that just left her.
Then out of the blue on the way back from picking it up, IronGOL showed. Well, I wasn't planning on this - LURE wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was, and it wouldn't save anyway (no EXIT or portal out of the temple), and there's almost no use for it. Anyway, it's here, so say hello to the wielder of the final Blue Magic skill in the game. Yeah. You probably don't know about TOXIC unless you're a hardcore FF1 enthusiast who likes studying trivia. Not only is this on a 1/64 monster, they also only ever use it at 1/8 odds per turn. They can hit decently hard but they're certainly not going to last more than a few rounds even with their resistances to everything but time and 100 DEF. 304HP is not a lot.
I used the White Shirt until I had enough stacks, then sat back using equipment ineffectively until it used the skill - I had AZURE AFFINITY on idle standby without using a Blue spell, not sure if it needed to be used on the turn the spell was used (which would be even worse design), but I learned it whether it did or not. TOXIC is too little too late for the Blue Mage. Even if you have a way out of the temple from there.
Then things got really ugly when SORCERERs showed up, the 3/64 on the floor. There were a couple spots on the encounter table where this could happen where the 7 shortly follows the 8. I HERO'S RIMEd and got out, but not before they got Tracy. Two warriors left. Never give up! Never surrender! Pressing on was all I could do at this point. I wasn't about to redo the temple unless I lost. At the very least, it made things a little exciting. I passed the strong equipment around and pressed on. TIAMAT was something of a slog, but she couldn't do anything to threaten me either.
The burning question was, would one attacker be enough for CHAOS? Here's what Bluto's stats looked like before heading in. I was thinking maybe since Bard is here. Only one way to find out.
Round 1 started well enough: the Auto Harp first used MANA'S PAEON. Would've prefered ANGELSONG, but that's nice too. Barbra followed up with DEXTROUS ETUDE and Bluto hit for 459, 2 criticals. CHAOS used CRACK. Barbra followed with VALOR MINUET, ICE3 did 68/40, and Bluto did 322. So far, so good.
CHAOS next used a physical on Bluto for 196. Not what I wanted to see. Barbra popped her LIMIT to give another stack of crit boosting. Bluto then hit for 730! I tried a CONVERGENCE NUCLEAR next turn which did around 442. CHAOS used LIT3, but he was almost finished. Only another physical on Bluto would end me - I didn't have confidence that Barbra would be able to salvage things on her own.
Nope. It was a weak last hit, but it was enough.
All in all, I liked this grouping of jobs. It managed to be a relatively well-balanced party that could do a lot of things, especially killing things instantly. I also got very high level without really trying, heh. All that bonus experience added up over time. Blue Mage was ironically the most disappointing for being the one I was looking forward to the most, but it fell within expectations. Bard was nicely balanced, Dark Knight somehow barely made the gimmick work, and Trainer was a fun mini Fighter with a gimmick.
Next up will be two challenge-ish playthroughs making use of magic and physical classes respectively. Those should be interesting! Look forward to seeing those reports soon.
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