More Final Fantasy

[T-hawk]

Hah, neat stuff. Hacking through memory to control and override FF4's ever-shifting party composition, exceedingly clever. I'd forgotten, but I did something along those lines with FF1 many years ago (before Realms Beyond), hacking in class-changed characters and multiple Masmunes from the start of the game.

Can you paste in multiple copies of the same character? How about reprising my FF5 Brave Bards with a five-Edward party?

[Sofis]

   
Absolutely, I don't think there are any checks for anything except when the game goes looking for a specific character.

   
Note also interesting graphical effect when switching out the world map character: Cecil with Edward's palette.

[English Language]

Oh dear. If I had ever played FF4, I might actually do that.

[Iainuki]

There is a charity event going on soon that involves FF5 challenge runs for random jobs: http://fourjobfiesta.com/help.php I'm probably going to participate if I have time next week.

[Jowy]

I'm watching CVagts play it Monday

[Iainuki]

For my wind crystal job, I drew knight. I wasn't too happy about this---I specifically said before starting that I hoped I didn't draw knight, because it's boring. Anyway, there's not really any strategy to opening the game with knight. I decided to try starting ironcore because I could. Karlabos, Siren, and Magisa went down in quick succession, Magisa not even getting to summon Forza. Entering Waltz Tower, I made my first serious mistake: I didn't buy all iron equipment before going in because it would have cost all my money. I died for the first time to a back attack with a sorcerer in the Tower. The sorcerer stopped Butz, and then I tried attacking the sorcerer, which was futile because of Drain and the double back row penalty, and died in short order. If I'd spent my first turn swapping rows and had all iron aromr, I [i[might[/i] have been able to pull it out, but I doubt it, drain was doing almost as much damage as I had HP. That ended iron core, though I also died in short order to Galura from lack of iron gear.

Realistically, though, ironcore was never going to happen because my water crystal job was berserker. I hate so my new goal was to make it without doing any serious grinding. I made my second major mistake when facing Liquid Flame by not getting and setting Double Grip beforehand. I died, of course. I fought random encounters until my berserker learned Double Grip, set it on everyone, and killed Liquid Flame with two characters dead. If I'd been smarter, I could easily have gotten my berserker Double Grip and won on my first attempt. Exploding Karnak Castle was really easy with Double Grip, I simply shredded everything, picked up all the chests with time to square, and punted on Iron Claw. My fire crystal job was archer, which meant I got to do the Ancient Library with three knights and a berserker. This went about as well as you'd expect. I killed Ifrit with two characters alive and died to Byblos on my first attempt when he countered with Armor against my first attack. My second try I got incredibly lucky: he never cast Armor. My knights could barely out-damage his Drain counters even without Armor on, and my berserker actually saved me with an amazing 700 damage axe hit to end the fight with, again, two people.

I promptly swapped two people to archer after reaching Crescent Island and got my first easy boss kill in awhile by taking down Crayclaw with a coral sword and thunder bows. Sandworm was a maddening fight. I had to waste my first round of actions killing my own berserker because otherwise she would kill me by repeatedly provoking the Demi counter, the HP leak from Quicksand was punishing and meant I had barely enough time to even theoretically do enough damage to win, and I couldn't get the timing on the Sandworm's hole-switching so was still eating Demi. I was about to give up and start grinding when I finally got the timing right, avoided the counters, and managed to get in 10 hits to win with---wait for it---two characters alive. Adamantoise died to frost bows and the flameguns, rockets, and Sol Cannon were straightforward with the same lightning element weapons. I died on my first attempt on ArchaeAvis to blaze and thunder---I had no healing so multitarget damage was destroying me. I won on my second attempt due to crazy luck: on the way from the save point, I got the rare drop from a whirl demon, a darkness bow, which not only boosted my damage but made ArchaeAvis's status-inflicting physical attack miss. It cooperated by never casting a multitarget damage the entire fight, and I handily shredded it.

My earth crystal job rounded the boring suck with dancer. Right. I was scared of the clean-up at the end of world one, but I didn't need to be. I died once to Titan, swapped to berserker, and didn't actually need it because everyone survived the final Earthshaker. The key to Titan is that he can only attack physically, so as long as you have good blocking and damage, you can keep your HP up and survive his final attack. Puroboros took forever but weren't difficult, as usual for a non-solo game, because usually they don't kill more than one person a round and phoenix down exists. I killed Chimera Brain on the first attempt to my shock by winning the damage race and using two hi-potions.

I think I drew the most boring possible party in four job fiesta. Knight and berserker are definitely the most boring wind and water crystal jobs, and there's a strong argument that archer and dancer are the most boring fire and earth crystal jobs. My strategy for the entire game consists of picking appropriate equipment, attacking, and hoping that the enemies run out of HP before I do. My final setup is going to be a knight, archer, and dancer with !X-Fight and a berserker with---something.

[Iainuki]

The first thing I discovered on starting World Two was that !Animals was actually useful. At the levels I started World Two at, I got a significant proportion of nightingales, which were literally my only sources of both multitarget healing and free healing. At the same time, it was clear this was a strategy with a very limited lifespan, because after level 20 the percentage of nightingales falls and eventually the healing relative to my HP would become too small. It's turned out that the former effect predominates: toward the end of World Two, the randomness of using !Animals for healing is becoming more and more of a liability. I don't have any other good sources of healing, though.

!Animals took care of Gilgamesh on the bridge handily enough with berserker and knight double-grip damage. I started off putting !Animals on my dancer to take advantage of their higher Mag stat and because, honestly, the dancer was always my weakest character, especially at the start of World Two. Later on, I had to double-up !Animals on my dancer and my archer, who did about half the damage of my knight and berseker with double grip. My archer's ability to target fire, lightning, and ice weaknesses was very useful in fighting the random encounters in the early parts of World Two. I was also rather impressed how much damage the Defense-reducing effects of axes added, though their variance and miss rate didn't make them superior to swords on the whole. The bosses were, of course, easy. I killed the T-Rex Skeleton with a phoenix down, the Hiryuu Flower went down on my first attempt to a lucky hit from a killer bow that proced its death effect on the first attack, Gilgamesh and Enkidou on the boat I just overpowered with healing from !Animals, and Atmos died easily to my berserker, dancer, and knight after killing my archer. Barrier tower wasn't at all difficult though a red dragon guarding the drain sword killed me once due to an unlucky streak of no nightingales. The crystals killed me on my first and second attempts, convincing me that I had not enough healing to defeat their hit-all magic attacks. On my third attempt, I changed strategies to attack exclusively with a killer bow, counting on the 8% chance of procing death to eventually work and take out the crystals while I used !Animals to heal myself and had the rest of my party use hi-potions on the crystals themselves to keep them healthy. This worked better than it had any right to. Even Exdeath's Castle wasn't too bad, with the only yellow dragons being serious threats though the damage floors were incredibly annoying.

Of course, then there's Exdeath. I have no idea how to beat Exdeath without a ton of grinding, which frankly I'm not willing to do. I had no intention of grinding four wall rings, that would have taken forever. Exdeath has 32768 HP, is incredibly fast, and does massive damage that I have no reliable means of healing at all. The only approach I can think of that doesn't involve massive grinding is simply making attempts until I get really lucky with nightingales, sword dances, and the like. That probably would take as long or longer than grinding. My Four Job Fiesta may well be ending here unless I hit on some brilliant idea I've been missing so far.

[T-hawk]

Wall Rings do sound like the most feasible option. Grinding them would take forever? You should be able to beat Wall Knights at least once per minute with a fast-forwarding emulator, so racking up the four would only take an hour. Probably didn't keep a save from the Barrier Tower, though?

[Iainuki]

Wall Rings do sound like the most feasible option. Grinding them would take forever? You should be able to beat Wall Knights at least once per minute with a fast-forwarding emulator, so racking up the four would only take an hour. Probably didn't keep a save from the Barrier Tower, though?

Nope, didn't keep a save from Barrier Tower. After some experimentation last night, though, I'm not convinced it would even matter because I wasn't making it to Exdeath's second phase. Vacuum Wave and Dynamo were murdering me, my archer and dancer couldn't even take one hit from Vacuum Wave in the front row despite having the highest physical-defense gear I could give them minus the bone mail. I don't think it's possible to do it with this party without a ton of grinding. I don't have a good estimate of how much it would take other than that I'm not even close at the moment.

[Iainuki]

After thinking about the possibilities for Exdeath, I was looking at the NeoExdeath battle, and I think it's all but hopeless without massive grinding for levels. NeoExdeath's second form has dead spots in the code that will reduce the damage from !X-Fight to three-fifths after I use the magic lamp to nuke the 4th part. Worse, since I can't control my berserker's or !X-Fight's targets, I won't necessarily be able to balance damage between the last two parts so I'll have a random chance of facing the Meteo/Vacuum Wave rampage, adding another RNG element to what will be an already very RNG-dependent battle. I have no other abilities that enhance damage other than Double Grip, which precludes use of a shield and only helps two of my four characters anyways. I also have no source of large healing except elixirs and no source of multitarget healing period. Bah, lousy rolls for my jobs. Maybe next year I'll get a combination I can win with without spending a ton of time grinding.