FF4 Unprecedented Crisis Part 2
Nov. 22nd, 2024 02:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirsystemerrorLast time, Cecil and company managed to reach Baron without their ship being attacked at sea. They defeated the fake, drowned king Cagnazzo in time to save Baigan, but due to an airship shortage, had to go through the Misty Mountains to reach Troia, defeated the blighted despot Scarmiglione on the way there. There, Golbez attacked and defeated them, only for Tellah to attack and defeat him. The old Sage survived the casting of Meteo, in this history.
So now what do we do? The hack gives no hint of this. Go to the Magnetic Cave and try to protect the crystal by hiding it there, similar to The After Years? Nope. We're not allowed into the Magnetic Cave, with the game pushing us back for no discernible reason open entry. Do we go to Mysidia and climb Mt. Ordeals to become a paladin? Nope, the latter is blocked by fire, and the former Cecil refuses to enter out of shame. Agart? Mythril Town? All you'll find there are places to shop.
No, instead you have to go to Eblan. Here, you meet up with Edge, and an out-of-character Rubicante. In this hack, he really did experiment on Edge's parents, instead of it being Lugae and Rubicante being disgusted with that. This is where the hack starts to diverge from "alternate history" into "reimagining", and this is the first of many questionable changes for the sake of being changed that some ROMhacks have a bad habit of doing. Luckily, I like ROMhack deconstruction about as much as alternate history, so here we go.
As for Edge himself, he lost his unique Ninja magic for Black Magic with an elemental focus, including Tornado which now does Wind damage. Due to the makeup of your team at the moment and the loss of Boomerangs as a weapon type, that's what he's most useful with in the now enemy-laden castle - though Tornado is the only useful one, since the only others are the level 1 elemental spells and Fire2. As a random note, don't quite understand how, but Ninja is coded in an interesting way to replace a Black Magic command set for him specifically.
There are still some trapped chests, but only lone Stalemen are in these, which Cid can shred. They guard various pieces of Flame equipment. Finally, the random encounters around the castle itself are a bit weaker, being from Troia's set instead of Eblan
Rubicante is in the basement. I equipped the Flame Shield and Flame Armor on Cecil and Cid respectively - they protect against fire in this hack instead of ice. The ones in the front row attack, Rydia summons Shiva if the cloak is open (2000+ of his 10000HP! Which is a bit less because of a death message) and Bomb if not, and Edge is pretty much an item bot.
I make use of a neat trick here: remember how in my Solo Rosa challenge, I mentioned that Rubicante will revive your whole party if you hit him with fire? It works that way in this hack too, and I took advantage of this when people went down. All in all, it wasn't a difficult fight. He's implied to retreat after being defeated.
############
I promised a hack that drastically went down the drain in quality, and so I shall deliver.
So beyond Rubicante is the Cave of the Eblan's living quarters floor. Yang leaves you in order to lead the armies of Eblan. The enemies in here are from the same part of the game as they would ordinarily be, and are a bit painful. Which makes you wonder why he replaced them on the overworld and not here. Nothing really of note in the shops, aside from Shruikens being 100GP apiece. I pick up a good stock of them for Edge's use.
So you go through, and then you end up in the enemy stronghold: the Tower of Zot. Which is somehow the Tower of Babil in this complete with the Babil music, but it has the same enemies as Zot. Enemies that are weaker than the ones in the cave leading there. Why he felt it necessary to do this fusion, I have no idea. Rydia learned Sylph during this excrusion, but the treasure really wasn't much to talk about.
The Magus Sisters weren't hard at all. They only got a chance to get off a single Delta Attack, between Cecil/Cid's attacks, Rydia's Bomb summon, and Edge throwing Shruikens, before Cindy kicked it. Sandy did throw out a Comet, but Mindy and her fell shortly thereafter.
In this hack, instead of there being mind control, Kain is just pretending to be loyal to Golbez. This bugs me in a bit of a weird way, though I'm not sure why
Barbariccia is up next. Somehow, Rosa tricked her into untying her, overpowered her, and tied her down in her place. Cecil fails to notice until he's untied Barbariccia, because I guess all blondes look the same, and so Kain teams up with us to take her down. She was an easy fight. In addition to Kain's jumping, Edge's throwing as in my solo challenge with him could pierce through and deal damage. Rydia's Sylph is Wind-elemental, and also worked to deal with her effectively.
Hey, stupid ROMhacker! When you write dialogue like this in an attempt at humor, get your facts straight! There's two moons in the sky in the world of FF4! Faulty dialogue - or more commonly, reference-laden, especially just for the sake of making a reference - is one of my biggest pet peeves with ROMhacks. In less crazy news, apparently the tower does leads to the moon, rather than summoning a giant robot or anything. But yeah, I was watching a friend play this before I got here, and my exact reaction was
[06/29][00:50:17] "The moon. As in, the one in the sky."
[06/29][00:50:30] bluntness aside, THERE'S TWO OF THEM :^)
All right, so we go back down. To the floor where you entered, there was a locked door. You can enter it with the Tower Key, and it leads to a Crystal Room. By the way, it's possible to encounter enemies from the second version of vanilla Babil in the brief walk between there and the crystal room. I got a preemptive here, so it wasn't that big a deal, though.
And suddenly, Rosa? This scene has some of the strangest original dialogue so far, not counting any forced references. Rosa goes around greeting everyone; kissing Cecil, saying hi to Cid who wants her to call him Grandpa for some reason, thanking Kain for being a spy, acting motherly to Rydia, meeting Edge, and generally acting cutesy. Also, I guess how she did it was she wooed Barbariccia into playing some hardcore BDSM but then ran off, the same Barbariccia who's implied to want Kain, but okay.
We get ready to go to the one and only moon by placing the Crystals on their respective altars, when suddenly, it's not working! What could be missing? Rydia guesses Heart, and I reach through the internet and strangle the ROMhacker for that stupid reference. Golbez reveals the second set of Crystals and the Underworld, and I guess in an act of being too demonstrative, drops us in a trapdoor to it. We somehow lose Rydia during this, ending up at the base of the Tower of Babil.
We can't go in there because Kain stops us, but we can go to the Dwarves' Castle, where Palom and Porom somehow ended up in after casting Warp on the ship earlier. The Dwarves offer them as help, and for once, the ROMhacker does something good with Cecil's reaction to them being Mysidian. Cid leaves us to help upgrade the tanks, and also a random airship lying around. It's red, and it's from the dwarves, so the twins come up with the name the Red Dwarf. So in the course of a few dungeons, our entire party save Cecil has been replaced.
So Porom is an interesting character. She can strangely equip Hammers now, and needs one to use her new ability, Bonk! It has a 25% chance each of casting Arise, Haste, Blink, or Esuna. While of questionable use, it's at least leagues better than the original Cry. Her defenses are still low, as is her attack multiplier, so this is more of a cute gimmick than something you can really rely on. They're also two handed, so you'll give up an armlet if you use it.
Palom has been given his Bluff command back, renamed Focus. Unlike his sister, he has nothing drastically special equipment-wise. So he has to do what Black Mages do best instead. Both of the twins suffer from Edge syndrome - they come at a much lower level than the rest of your party would normally be at.
With the Airship, you now you get a choice: the Feymarch, Bahamut's Lagoon (GET IT??? :D :D :D) - which replaces the Sylph Cave, or the Ice Mines - which replaces the Sealed Cave. This is where the game starts to get a bit more open-ended, ridiculously hard, and also quite hilarious in the wrong way. Each of these has a crystal, and props for actually giving them locations which vanilla and even The After Years is noticeably evasive on; they likely just ran out of time and never bothered to explain it. They house the Shadow, Holy, and Ice Crystals respectively, with the Dwarves' Castle having the Bolt one.
As for easily-accessible shopping, the castle doesn't have much of anything. Some of the stuff in Tomra is ridiculously expensive. I decide to skip out on most of it aside from grabbing some Ice Arrows for Rosa, due to a shortage of money and hoping I'll be getting even better stuff in the various dungeons.
Also, as it turns out, King Santos of Tomra is literally Santa Claus. Dwarves say Lali-Ho. He says Ho-ho-ho. Since when does Santa live in the geographical equivalent of Hell?!
I decide on the Feymarch first, to check out that last shopping locale. And it is brutal. You have no access to Float, and you're fully expected to cope with it by buying a billion healing items, soldiering through, and opening the menu every few steps over the damage tiles under penalty of having to run from random encounters. That are very capable of one-shotting some of your party members, because your equipment and levels aren't anywhere near what's practical for these enemies. Having to catch up the twins doesn't help this much, either...
I can cope, though. And the best part about coming here is, I get this thing from a trapped chest. The five Warriors in guarding it weren't a big deal, and fell to DarkWaves and Tornados. Here's Cecil's stats with it on. Though it has a penalty of -5 to every stat, it is extremely powerful and quite accurate.
Rydia takes Yang's role of being saved by the Sylphs, who have relocated here due to their cave being taken over by a reference. The boss, who attacks after you get the Shadow Crystal...
Not only is it a palette swap of Scarmiglione, it's the exact same fight! There's a bunch of Zombies, there's him in the back, he counters every time you hit him (with Stop), and he orders the goons to attack with RedFeast. Except they are way too powerful and leave my party completely crippled after just one of them. Apparently, these repeats may be in-part due to engine limitations making it difficult to insert new AI routines...but still.
I can't seem to kill him before he can get it off, and when I do kill him to stop those attacks, I still have to deal with the vicious Reapers. They have a ridiculous 6000HP, which Demi can at least cut into, but their physicals alone hit hard. So I have no choice but to turn back and leave Ciriatto for later.
The Lagoon's enemies are somewhat more manageable. Most interesting was a trapped chest with this guy in it. He actually was kinda like a mashup between FF1 Astos and his appearance in this game. He opened with a Fire2/Lit2/Ice2 combo, and would throw out Death and a party-wide Slow as part of his script. While I didn't have the equipment from later on in the cave that would deal insane damage to him, this wasn't too difficult an encounter. Each Shruiken throw did 1000 damage in particular.
The Avenger was the prize from the Wizard fight, but also in the same room of six was this thing. The Mystic Hammer was enough that Porom could actually do semirespectable damage when fighting in the front row. Specifically, it's extremely effective on mechs and mages - which included the ToadLady enemies and her TinyToads (speaking of, Cecil's and the twins' equipment helped stave off that and the Malboro's Breath). It can randomly silence on a hit, and gives a +15 to Wisdom and Will. The Rune Bow also was highly effective.
Completing a trifect was the Mage Masher, guarded by this ugly-looking thing. Flame Sword, Fire Arrows, and Fire2 took care of it quite handily.
A Rubicante palette swap who goes by Draghinazzo was the boss here. He even restores your health. He claims to be a prophet for Bahamut, but a slip of the tongue and we get to fight him.
He hits like a goddamned truck, but then again, so does Cecil with the Avenger. It seems the sword is Dark-elemental. Because of it, this one didn't last too long. He opened with Holy to flatten someone, then closed his cloak and used Blink. Had Edge and Palom attack to disperse it. His only other real move was a double physical combo concentrated on Porom. If I had Bio on Palom, this would've been a total stomp.
The Black Shirt and White Shirt were in the chests behind him. They were an interesting choice. The Angel Robes the twins had on do give +5 to Wisdom and Will (as well as Vitality), resisting Mute, Pig, and Toad. The others give +15 to their respective stat, and the White Robe resists the basic three elements. Seems situational.
I went to the Ice Mines next. It is literally the Ice Cave from FF1 in layout. Good creativity. The encounters here seem to be easiest of the trio, but their payout and the encounter rate are both low.
There was another Wizard-in-a-box here. It took 3184 from Edge, 2322 from Porom, then flopped over dead. The Chaos Blade was the reward from this, another Dark Swrod for Cecil, but the Blood Sword was coming out stronger even factoring in the stat drop.
Interestingly enough, the same Warp trick as would work in FF1 to get to your destination works here, though I explored the lower floors anyway. There was a huge cache of gold down there and an IceBrand.
Sheesh, now he's even recycling dialogue and circumstances on the palette swaps. Or making fun of himself/engine limitations.
The latest palette swap, Alichino, was a straightforward affair. His Ice3s hurt, but were not really lethal. When he raised the ice (with another stupid reference), he did throw up Reflect, but it didn't stop Cecil's Flamesword or the two Fire Arrows Rosa had on her, both of which could do over 1000 each. Despite getting owned by the Reflect, this one was a simple affair. And Palom and Porom find the real king alive and well in the ice after the battle.
Now for this guy proper. A couple of Yaguu Darkness and some extra attacks did indeed kill him before he could order the RedFeast brigade. I decided to get a few more levels beforehand, on seeing what was waiting when testing Bio for curiousity purposes later. And holy crap, Harm did not disappoint. Despite this, it was still better to do this than to save the Yaguus for later.
And naturally you fight undead Ciriatto too. He opens by telling you to hear the song of the fallen angel, uses Angel song on you, and reduces everyone to critical HP. Luckily, Porom had Cure3, but she was still my primary damage dealer with Harm, making this really awkward. Rosa's Holy Arrows did 1600. The first time, I got smacked by DarkWave and killed off from there. The second time, I prepared for it.
With a few Palom Focused Fire2s (for lack of anything better, he wasn't weak to it), thrown Shruiken or Edge attacks, and healing potions when needed, I got the kill. He had 16000 HP total.
So back to the Castle. I do a bit of inventory management, and unequip Rosa because she leaves. Cid upgraded the tanks, and even used the Bolt Crystal to generate an anti-Warp field. But then the Red Wings attack, Cid's fortification is put to the test, and Rosa leaves to help for some reason. Now, it's known that FF4 actually was indeed going to have two sets of archfiends. Calcabrina is one of the remnants of this, named after one of the Malebranche in Dante's Inferno much like the rest of them and the archfiends here. Is it finally time for its sort-of official promotion?!
Of course not! Meet Malacoda of the Thunder. She'll be able to bypass the electric barrier stopping Golbez from just Warping in and taking the Crystal. Now see? In-universe references are the kind of thing you should go with.
Meanwhile, we still do need to deal with those...that one doll. It's ridiculously easy. Palom's Bio and Porom's regular attacks could do over 2000 damage. It has 10000HP, and accomplished nothing significant before falling to pieces. It even had its HP run out.
Then Golbez shows up, beats us down in a cutscene because he's a cheater, takes the three Crystals we garthered, only to fall prey to his only other weakness besides Meteo: getting literally stabbed in the back by Kain! Malacoda shows up, and now we have to fight her.
.
As with the last three, this is the same deal as with her palette swap. She goes into a spin, Kain needs to Jump on her to get her out of it. This was really annoying at first, because she used Magnet to Stop him. She also hit Porom with it, which was dangerous and forced me to heal with HiPotions with everyone else, and Palom, who had been Focusing to power up his Ice2s while waiting on Kain. It seemed she had an Ice weakness.
I reset and got Kain a Blizzard Lance, but it didn't contribute anything other than heightened offense - his Thunder Spear was perfectly capable of hitting her due to a Wind weakness from her floating (weaknesses override absorption when it comes to physical hits). After a while of fighting, her 30000HP was all gone.
So status report? Golbez has 7/8 crystals, but it's useless without the last one we hold. Because Cid is an engineer and Rosa is a fucking badass and heavily damaged their airships with nothing more than her bow and sharpshooting skills, they get to lead the frontal assault on the tower. Meanwhile, everyone else will enter, using Kain's knowledge of the tower's layout, Edge's Ninja skills, Palom and Porom's magic, and Cecil's pretty face, and take back the rest of them!
Next | Index
So now what do we do? The hack gives no hint of this. Go to the Magnetic Cave and try to protect the crystal by hiding it there, similar to The After Years? Nope. We're not allowed into the Magnetic Cave, with the game pushing us back for no discernible reason open entry. Do we go to Mysidia and climb Mt. Ordeals to become a paladin? Nope, the latter is blocked by fire, and the former Cecil refuses to enter out of shame. Agart? Mythril Town? All you'll find there are places to shop.
No, instead you have to go to Eblan. Here, you meet up with Edge, and an out-of-character Rubicante. In this hack, he really did experiment on Edge's parents, instead of it being Lugae and Rubicante being disgusted with that. This is where the hack starts to diverge from "alternate history" into "reimagining", and this is the first of many questionable changes for the sake of being changed that some ROMhacks have a bad habit of doing. Luckily, I like ROMhack deconstruction about as much as alternate history, so here we go.
As for Edge himself, he lost his unique Ninja magic for Black Magic with an elemental focus, including Tornado which now does Wind damage. Due to the makeup of your team at the moment and the loss of Boomerangs as a weapon type, that's what he's most useful with in the now enemy-laden castle - though Tornado is the only useful one, since the only others are the level 1 elemental spells and Fire2. As a random note, don't quite understand how, but Ninja is coded in an interesting way to replace a Black Magic command set for him specifically.
There are still some trapped chests, but only lone Stalemen are in these, which Cid can shred. They guard various pieces of Flame equipment. Finally, the random encounters around the castle itself are a bit weaker, being from Troia's set instead of Eblan
Rubicante is in the basement. I equipped the Flame Shield and Flame Armor on Cecil and Cid respectively - they protect against fire in this hack instead of ice. The ones in the front row attack, Rydia summons Shiva if the cloak is open (2000+ of his 10000HP! Which is a bit less because of a death message) and Bomb if not, and Edge is pretty much an item bot.
I make use of a neat trick here: remember how in my Solo Rosa challenge, I mentioned that Rubicante will revive your whole party if you hit him with fire? It works that way in this hack too, and I took advantage of this when people went down. All in all, it wasn't a difficult fight. He's implied to retreat after being defeated.
############
I promised a hack that drastically went down the drain in quality, and so I shall deliver.
So beyond Rubicante is the Cave of the Eblan's living quarters floor. Yang leaves you in order to lead the armies of Eblan. The enemies in here are from the same part of the game as they would ordinarily be, and are a bit painful. Which makes you wonder why he replaced them on the overworld and not here. Nothing really of note in the shops, aside from Shruikens being 100GP apiece. I pick up a good stock of them for Edge's use.
So you go through, and then you end up in the enemy stronghold: the Tower of Zot. Which is somehow the Tower of Babil in this complete with the Babil music, but it has the same enemies as Zot. Enemies that are weaker than the ones in the cave leading there. Why he felt it necessary to do this fusion, I have no idea. Rydia learned Sylph during this excrusion, but the treasure really wasn't much to talk about.
The Magus Sisters weren't hard at all. They only got a chance to get off a single Delta Attack, between Cecil/Cid's attacks, Rydia's Bomb summon, and Edge throwing Shruikens, before Cindy kicked it. Sandy did throw out a Comet, but Mindy and her fell shortly thereafter.
In this hack, instead of there being mind control, Kain is just pretending to be loyal to Golbez. This bugs me in a bit of a weird way, though I'm not sure why
Barbariccia is up next. Somehow, Rosa tricked her into untying her, overpowered her, and tied her down in her place. Cecil fails to notice until he's untied Barbariccia, because I guess all blondes look the same, and so Kain teams up with us to take her down. She was an easy fight. In addition to Kain's jumping, Edge's throwing as in my solo challenge with him could pierce through and deal damage. Rydia's Sylph is Wind-elemental, and also worked to deal with her effectively.
Hey, stupid ROMhacker! When you write dialogue like this in an attempt at humor, get your facts straight! There's two moons in the sky in the world of FF4! Faulty dialogue - or more commonly, reference-laden, especially just for the sake of making a reference - is one of my biggest pet peeves with ROMhacks. In less crazy news, apparently the tower does leads to the moon, rather than summoning a giant robot or anything. But yeah, I was watching a friend play this before I got here, and my exact reaction was
[06/29][00:50:17]
[06/29][00:50:30]
All right, so we go back down. To the floor where you entered, there was a locked door. You can enter it with the Tower Key, and it leads to a Crystal Room. By the way, it's possible to encounter enemies from the second version of vanilla Babil in the brief walk between there and the crystal room. I got a preemptive here, so it wasn't that big a deal, though.
And suddenly, Rosa? This scene has some of the strangest original dialogue so far, not counting any forced references. Rosa goes around greeting everyone; kissing Cecil, saying hi to Cid who wants her to call him Grandpa for some reason, thanking Kain for being a spy, acting motherly to Rydia, meeting Edge, and generally acting cutesy. Also, I guess how she did it was she wooed Barbariccia into playing some hardcore BDSM but then ran off, the same Barbariccia who's implied to want Kain, but okay.
We get ready to go to the one and only moon by placing the Crystals on their respective altars, when suddenly, it's not working! What could be missing? Rydia guesses Heart, and I reach through the internet and strangle the ROMhacker for that stupid reference. Golbez reveals the second set of Crystals and the Underworld, and I guess in an act of being too demonstrative, drops us in a trapdoor to it. We somehow lose Rydia during this, ending up at the base of the Tower of Babil.
We can't go in there because Kain stops us, but we can go to the Dwarves' Castle, where Palom and Porom somehow ended up in after casting Warp on the ship earlier. The Dwarves offer them as help, and for once, the ROMhacker does something good with Cecil's reaction to them being Mysidian. Cid leaves us to help upgrade the tanks, and also a random airship lying around. It's red, and it's from the dwarves, so the twins come up with the name the Red Dwarf. So in the course of a few dungeons, our entire party save Cecil has been replaced.
So Porom is an interesting character. She can strangely equip Hammers now, and needs one to use her new ability, Bonk! It has a 25% chance each of casting Arise, Haste, Blink, or Esuna. While of questionable use, it's at least leagues better than the original Cry. Her defenses are still low, as is her attack multiplier, so this is more of a cute gimmick than something you can really rely on. They're also two handed, so you'll give up an armlet if you use it.
Palom has been given his Bluff command back, renamed Focus. Unlike his sister, he has nothing drastically special equipment-wise. So he has to do what Black Mages do best instead. Both of the twins suffer from Edge syndrome - they come at a much lower level than the rest of your party would normally be at.
With the Airship, you now you get a choice: the Feymarch, Bahamut's Lagoon (GET IT??? :D :D :D) - which replaces the Sylph Cave, or the Ice Mines - which replaces the Sealed Cave. This is where the game starts to get a bit more open-ended, ridiculously hard, and also quite hilarious in the wrong way. Each of these has a crystal, and props for actually giving them locations which vanilla and even The After Years is noticeably evasive on; they likely just ran out of time and never bothered to explain it. They house the Shadow, Holy, and Ice Crystals respectively, with the Dwarves' Castle having the Bolt one.
As for easily-accessible shopping, the castle doesn't have much of anything. Some of the stuff in Tomra is ridiculously expensive. I decide to skip out on most of it aside from grabbing some Ice Arrows for Rosa, due to a shortage of money and hoping I'll be getting even better stuff in the various dungeons.
Also, as it turns out, King Santos of Tomra is literally Santa Claus. Dwarves say Lali-Ho. He says Ho-ho-ho. Since when does Santa live in the geographical equivalent of Hell?!
I decide on the Feymarch first, to check out that last shopping locale. And it is brutal. You have no access to Float, and you're fully expected to cope with it by buying a billion healing items, soldiering through, and opening the menu every few steps over the damage tiles under penalty of having to run from random encounters. That are very capable of one-shotting some of your party members, because your equipment and levels aren't anywhere near what's practical for these enemies. Having to catch up the twins doesn't help this much, either...
I can cope, though. And the best part about coming here is, I get this thing from a trapped chest. The five Warriors in guarding it weren't a big deal, and fell to DarkWaves and Tornados. Here's Cecil's stats with it on. Though it has a penalty of -5 to every stat, it is extremely powerful and quite accurate.
Rydia takes Yang's role of being saved by the Sylphs, who have relocated here due to their cave being taken over by a reference. The boss, who attacks after you get the Shadow Crystal...
Not only is it a palette swap of Scarmiglione, it's the exact same fight! There's a bunch of Zombies, there's him in the back, he counters every time you hit him (with Stop), and he orders the goons to attack with RedFeast. Except they are way too powerful and leave my party completely crippled after just one of them. Apparently, these repeats may be in-part due to engine limitations making it difficult to insert new AI routines...but still.
I can't seem to kill him before he can get it off, and when I do kill him to stop those attacks, I still have to deal with the vicious Reapers. They have a ridiculous 6000HP, which Demi can at least cut into, but their physicals alone hit hard. So I have no choice but to turn back and leave Ciriatto for later.
The Lagoon's enemies are somewhat more manageable. Most interesting was a trapped chest with this guy in it. He actually was kinda like a mashup between FF1 Astos and his appearance in this game. He opened with a Fire2/Lit2/Ice2 combo, and would throw out Death and a party-wide Slow as part of his script. While I didn't have the equipment from later on in the cave that would deal insane damage to him, this wasn't too difficult an encounter. Each Shruiken throw did 1000 damage in particular.
The Avenger was the prize from the Wizard fight, but also in the same room of six was this thing. The Mystic Hammer was enough that Porom could actually do semirespectable damage when fighting in the front row. Specifically, it's extremely effective on mechs and mages - which included the ToadLady enemies and her TinyToads (speaking of, Cecil's and the twins' equipment helped stave off that and the Malboro's Breath). It can randomly silence on a hit, and gives a +15 to Wisdom and Will. The Rune Bow also was highly effective.
Completing a trifect was the Mage Masher, guarded by this ugly-looking thing. Flame Sword, Fire Arrows, and Fire2 took care of it quite handily.
A Rubicante palette swap who goes by Draghinazzo was the boss here. He even restores your health. He claims to be a prophet for Bahamut, but a slip of the tongue and we get to fight him.
He hits like a goddamned truck, but then again, so does Cecil with the Avenger. It seems the sword is Dark-elemental. Because of it, this one didn't last too long. He opened with Holy to flatten someone, then closed his cloak and used Blink. Had Edge and Palom attack to disperse it. His only other real move was a double physical combo concentrated on Porom. If I had Bio on Palom, this would've been a total stomp.
The Black Shirt and White Shirt were in the chests behind him. They were an interesting choice. The Angel Robes the twins had on do give +5 to Wisdom and Will (as well as Vitality), resisting Mute, Pig, and Toad. The others give +15 to their respective stat, and the White Robe resists the basic three elements. Seems situational.
I went to the Ice Mines next. It is literally the Ice Cave from FF1 in layout. Good creativity. The encounters here seem to be easiest of the trio, but their payout and the encounter rate are both low.
There was another Wizard-in-a-box here. It took 3184 from Edge, 2322 from Porom, then flopped over dead. The Chaos Blade was the reward from this, another Dark Swrod for Cecil, but the Blood Sword was coming out stronger even factoring in the stat drop.
Interestingly enough, the same Warp trick as would work in FF1 to get to your destination works here, though I explored the lower floors anyway. There was a huge cache of gold down there and an IceBrand.
Sheesh, now he's even recycling dialogue and circumstances on the palette swaps. Or making fun of himself/engine limitations.
The latest palette swap, Alichino, was a straightforward affair. His Ice3s hurt, but were not really lethal. When he raised the ice (with another stupid reference), he did throw up Reflect, but it didn't stop Cecil's Flamesword or the two Fire Arrows Rosa had on her, both of which could do over 1000 each. Despite getting owned by the Reflect, this one was a simple affair. And Palom and Porom find the real king alive and well in the ice after the battle.
Now for this guy proper. A couple of Yaguu Darkness and some extra attacks did indeed kill him before he could order the RedFeast brigade. I decided to get a few more levels beforehand, on seeing what was waiting when testing Bio for curiousity purposes later. And holy crap, Harm did not disappoint. Despite this, it was still better to do this than to save the Yaguus for later.
And naturally you fight undead Ciriatto too. He opens by telling you to hear the song of the fallen angel, uses Angel song on you, and reduces everyone to critical HP. Luckily, Porom had Cure3, but she was still my primary damage dealer with Harm, making this really awkward. Rosa's Holy Arrows did 1600. The first time, I got smacked by DarkWave and killed off from there. The second time, I prepared for it.
With a few Palom Focused Fire2s (for lack of anything better, he wasn't weak to it), thrown Shruiken or Edge attacks, and healing potions when needed, I got the kill. He had 16000 HP total.
So back to the Castle. I do a bit of inventory management, and unequip Rosa because she leaves. Cid upgraded the tanks, and even used the Bolt Crystal to generate an anti-Warp field. But then the Red Wings attack, Cid's fortification is put to the test, and Rosa leaves to help for some reason. Now, it's known that FF4 actually was indeed going to have two sets of archfiends. Calcabrina is one of the remnants of this, named after one of the Malebranche in Dante's Inferno much like the rest of them and the archfiends here. Is it finally time for its sort-of official promotion?!
Of course not! Meet Malacoda of the Thunder. She'll be able to bypass the electric barrier stopping Golbez from just Warping in and taking the Crystal. Now see? In-universe references are the kind of thing you should go with.
Meanwhile, we still do need to deal with those...that one doll. It's ridiculously easy. Palom's Bio and Porom's regular attacks could do over 2000 damage. It has 10000HP, and accomplished nothing significant before falling to pieces. It even had its HP run out.
Then Golbez shows up, beats us down in a cutscene because he's a cheater, takes the three Crystals we garthered, only to fall prey to his only other weakness besides Meteo: getting literally stabbed in the back by Kain! Malacoda shows up, and now we have to fight her.
.
As with the last three, this is the same deal as with her palette swap. She goes into a spin, Kain needs to Jump on her to get her out of it. This was really annoying at first, because she used Magnet to Stop him. She also hit Porom with it, which was dangerous and forced me to heal with HiPotions with everyone else, and Palom, who had been Focusing to power up his Ice2s while waiting on Kain. It seemed she had an Ice weakness.
I reset and got Kain a Blizzard Lance, but it didn't contribute anything other than heightened offense - his Thunder Spear was perfectly capable of hitting her due to a Wind weakness from her floating (weaknesses override absorption when it comes to physical hits). After a while of fighting, her 30000HP was all gone.
So status report? Golbez has 7/8 crystals, but it's useless without the last one we hold. Because Cid is an engineer and Rosa is a fucking badass and heavily damaged their airships with nothing more than her bow and sharpshooting skills, they get to lead the frontal assault on the tower. Meanwhile, everyone else will enter, using Kain's knowledge of the tower's layout, Edge's Ninja skills, Palom and Porom's magic, and Cecil's pretty face, and take back the rest of them!
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