More Final Fantasy

[Amelia]

Oh my. T-Hawk, i salute you.

[Sofis]

I was actually thinking of doing a playthrough with four white mages. I'm marginally sane, you see.

Forza showed up, White moved to the back row, and traded attacks for a long long time, slipping in a Cure about every third round.

There's actually a Flail in the Ship Graveyard, if you jump on the rocks right near the beginning. Not that the part where you went without was remotely the hard part.

In the Ronka Ruins came an opportunity that I had figured out some time ago and eagerly anticipated. It involves these Ghidra enemies (Hydra in the SNES translation). These foes offer White his best chance for powerleveling in the entire game by a huge margin. They are undead but lack the Heavy flag. That means the Raise spell could kill them instantly, but they have Reflect Wall status to foil that. But a Phoenix Down bypasses that (you can see the little angel sprite there) and does land the instant kill!

The best part is that they always drop Phoenix Downs when they die. They carry within them the key to their own destruction.

To entertain ourselves, who is who in that screenshot of the boss sprites? Catastrophe and Calofisteri are obvious; I guess the center one must be Necrofobia; but I'm not sure which of the rightmost two is Twin Tania or who the others are...?

From left to right, with SNES names:

Apocalypse, Catastroph, Calotisteri, Necrofobia, Halicarnaso, Twin Tania, Apanda.

Apocalypse, Catastroph and Twin Tania (at least) can be seen out of battle with those exact sprites. The rest closely resemble their in-battle sprites.

[Krill]

Wow. Also you need a new picture T-hawk, that one is kinda old...

[T-hawk]

I was actually thinking of doing a playthrough with four white mages. I'm marginally sane, you see.

You could try a variant like Sullla's FF1 white mages, with Cure as the only spells allowed. I have had enough of white mages for a while.

Apocalypse, Catastroph and Twin Tania (at least) can be seen out of battle with those exact sprites. The rest closely resemble their in-battle sprites.

Nitpick: not exactly the same sprite on Apocalypse; the one at that doorway is facing south/down, but Apoc's actual sprite at the save point can face any direction except south/down.

[Sofis]

You could try a variant like Sullla's FF1 white mages, with Cure as the only spells allowed. I have had enough of white mages for a while.

Did I mention the part where I'm marginally sane? :neenernee Nah, I have a different idea I'll probably do when I have time.

[luddite]

at the end of the day, we all have Aging status and a Doom clock overhead

I nominate this for quote of the month!

[Sullla]

STOP STEALING MY BIT!

But in all seriousness, bravo and well done. That was extraordinarily well played, and well written to boot. I agree that the Thief is probably the solo class that plays the closest to the White Mage. Low offense makes for a nightmare against so many bosses... The Thief has better speed and greater damage, but the White Mage has significantly better defensive abilities with Armor/Shell/Healing Staff power. I do think the White Mage is more difficult overall, so I'm glad you were the one to play out this variant.

To answer your question about the Abductor boss at Bal Castle, I never mentioned him because he dies so easily. I've never had a solo class experience any trouble there. If you get hit by Vampire, it's just a matter of hitting reset and trying again. Even low-offensive variants kill him quickly.

You played the game out the way I expected, having to run so many of the bosses out of MP to win. I thought that the Hiryuu Plant use of Image/Blink and the staggered approach to the Gilgamesh/Enkidou ship battles were absolutely brilliant. Those were two of the fights that I thought would be the most problematic. With bosses like Byblos/Atmos, it's all about playing for hours on end using your healing power until they run out of juice. Very tedious, but as you said, it's actually not that dangerous once you have the hang of it. After a while you get such a good feel for the boss AI routine, even able to see the "invisible" moves they take. It's hard to describe in words sometime when writing a report though! I'm also impressed that you were able to win at Level 68; the one other person who did a solo White Mage game, notdave over at Gamefaqs, reportedly won with a Level 87 White Mage. Completing the game some 20 levels lower is very impressive.

The funny thing about the White Mage is how it's this pitifully weak character for 90% of the game, and then suddenly at the end you get Holy spell and become the "Old Testament God smiting the sinners of Gomorrah", as you so correctly wrote. Holy is the strongest spell in the game when boosted by Sage Staff, spell attack 220 x 1.5 = 330. Bahamut/Flare are only spell attack 255. What's even more amusing is how the White Mage and Bard, two of the weakest solos in the game, both absolutely devastate the Great Trench dungeon, where most of the normal solos have a great deal of trouble. Funny how that works, when all the monsters are undead.

Anyway, I have absolutely no desire to play out that quest after you did all the hard work. Do you have any objections to me sticking a link to your website on my Final Fantasy page? It would be nice to have all the solo games collected in one place for readers. As far as the other characters, I have a Geomancer solo who's 95% of the way finished with the game, currently getting his rear kicked by Necrophobia in another RNG fest. I've had that on hold for a very long time now, doing intermittent starts and stops (try doing end of world 2 Exdeath with a Geomancer....) but I'll finish it eventually. You're welcome to go for the Red Mage if you want; I already know how I would do that one, and it wouldn't be that exciting for me. Since you already did a berserker game, I might take a spin at that next. You have to be careful, the solo games get very addicting. Once you play with the solo character, playing with four feels ridiculously easy.

Oh, and one last comment. That Cara/Krile sprite in the White Mage outfit is ridiculously cute. As Pitchfork Pat once wrote about FF5, "If I had kids, I would dress them like this."

[T-hawk]

Of course that should be linked among your roster of solos. And any more I might do.

A ha, so that's what happened to your Geomancer. All your other gaps were understandable for reasons of extreme difficulty (WM, Berserker) or not all that interesting (Red Mage, Mime). But I was really wondering why you hadn't done that oddest of the oddballs.

Do you have a link to notdave's stuff? You've mentioned him a few times but I haven't seen it. As for level, it could even be done down around 50 if not for Atmos. That's the only road block that needs massive leveling; there was no other answer to surviving the full pile of Comets short of 4000 HP times 99 Elixirs. Leveling never mattered after Atmos.

I read after writing about Abductor that Vampire behaves differently in the GBA version. The damage and healing is (max - current) HP instead of (max - current) / 2 as on the SNES. That means Vampire always heals the caster fully, which of course makes Abductor much more difficult on the GBA. If he's nearly dead, SNES Vampire deals 1250 and heals him for 1250, which can be overcome. On the GBA it's ±2500, a full heal and for most characters a full kill.

And yes, solos are addicting. With a full party, even stone and death effects are as harmless as Mini or whatever, just whip out an item and keep on going. Okay I may take the Red Mage at some point, but first I have some solo ideas where you haven't trod.

BTW on a completely different topic, I figured out how Arylon could have done the Purobolos battle. She needed to find a weapon that would do somewhere between 1200-1400 damage with Sword Dance. That way she could hit each bomb once without killing it then wait for it to explode near-harmlessly. It'd still need some repetition but probably less than 100 tries.

[Sullla]

This old thread from Caves of Narshe forums is the best source I've come across on the Internet from people doing solo runs in Final Fantasy 5. It starts out with people doing single class runs (all four characters the same job) and then somewhere in the middle of the thread people started doing solo games (although they like to call them SSCC games for "solo single class challenge", and this is why I hate acronyms!) This post has all of the levels for notdave's solo runs. I searched a while back for the original content on Gamefaqs, but had no idea how to find it. Their forums over there are incredibly antiquated, since they haven't been changed since something like 1998.

Also, the people at Caves of Narshe cheat outrageously using save states, rewind function, and dead thiefs/ninjas/geomancers for the status effects in "solo" games. The notion of thinking things through and doing something other than "power level to 99" apparently never occurred to most of those folks.

Well now that you posted this I really need to go back and finish that Geomancer game. I died over 200 times against Exdeath and was stuck there for over 6 months of real life time, so it's been delayed for a very long time now.

EDIT: Oh, and I was hoping to do the FF5 Advance classes at some point as well. Gladiator is retardedly easy for a solo game. Cannoneer looks kind of boring to do, since you can't get the shot that makes the class special until the third world. Oracle and Necromancer look insanely hard... like, the Necromancer can't heal himself with items, at all, during the whole game. The Oracle has the same equipment of the White Mage, without healing/defensive magic. I have some ideas here, but still... these have to be played out at some point, if only for the lols. We'll have to figure something out.

[T-hawk]

Thanks, I'll have a read through those. (Dear ghod, somebody decided they had to level to 12 to kill Wing Raptor with a Samurai? )

OK, you read through my veil on the GBA classes. I started the Gladiator yesterday. Simply banning Finisher until the job is unlocked normally brings it just about in line on power level. Cannoneer I plan to handle by figuring out (or looking up if they exist) some hack codes to bring in Buckshot and Blastshot at appropriate points in the game, I was thinking Crescent and Moore respectively. Necromancer can heal himself by breaking Fire Rods wearing a Flame Ring, and hopefully get through most bosses by rod breaking (Byblos will kill himself with Drains on the necro.) Oracle, well, one of us has to at least try out how dumb it is.