More Final Fantasy

[T-hawk]

Great report, Mr. Steinbeck. No I have no idea what bug lets a berserker on the SNES get a command menu with X-Fight. BTW, were you playing on the European GBA version? Some of the screenshots (especially the text font) look slightly different than mine. The red menus are great - I know what color my next FF5 variant will be.

Yes, we solved many challenges in different ways. Some tricks we both hit on, like getting the Berserkers blinded when that was necessary. The answer to Byblos was indeed "survive long enough till you hit a lucky streak", and Sandworm was also to just survive and heal while waiting for the berserkers to get it done. I don't know why the Sandworm takes less damage than he should. I just figured he had decent defense, without looking it up.

Nice thinking on Confusing LiquidFlame. And on stealing during the Karnak escape. You definitely have stealing and item availability memorized much better than I do. Lilith's Kiss on Purobolos was also clever, similar to my solution of silencing them. BTW, Turtle Shells are easily farmable in world 2 once you get the wind drake.

Did you get much use out of the Dancing Dagger? I liked it a lot, both for damage (it beat Atomos pretty quickly) and just for variety with the somewhat repetitive berserkers. Nice info on the Rune weapons; I used the Rune Axe but didn't try to understand how it really worked. In-game it says "Uses MP for critical hits", which is certainly misleading. Part of the overall weakness of the Berserker class is the rather bad selection of axes and hammers. Swords and katanas are much better. They can use the Chicken Knife, but so can everybody else, and there is only one to be found.

"So the plan is for everyone to wear Reflect Rings. Once one of the trio is dead, they will be caught in a revive->Delta Attack->die->revive loop, keeping one of them dead." , very clever. I beat them with brute force, leveling the berserkers with Mix until they could each make a one-hit kill. It does seem that they do not revive with full 17000 HP, though I'm not sure of the exact mechanics either.

Magic Hammer on Azulmagia was brilliant. I've beaten him before with Self-Destruct (which he will also learn and use, killing himself.) That was not permitted here and I didn't think to look for any other acceptable Blue spells. And Omega and Shinryuu we both did completely differently - you can read my report for those.

[Sofis]

Great report, Mr. Steinbeck. No I have no idea what bug lets a berserker on the SNES get a command menu with X-Fight.

I have a terrible habit of not giving needed context, and just assuming people will pick up on whatever I am thinking. There is not such bug; the menu belongs to another character. The damage numbers are the only relevant part. I was just demonstrating the magic power underflow bug I mentioned in my report.

BTW, were you playing on the European GBA version? Some of the screenshots (especially the text font) look slightly different than mine. The red menus are great - I know what color my next FF5 variant will be.

Yes I was. I originally hunted down the ROM for a chance to practice my German. And later versions of games are often less buggy... though that's not always a good thing.

Nice thinking on Confusing LiquidFlame. And on stealing during the Karnak escape. You definitely have stealing and item availability memorized much better than I do.

Actually, I looked through the enemy list before I started playing and copied the ones with relevant items or blue magic spells. Far more about obsessive use of reference materials than memorization.

Did you get much use out of the Dancing Dagger? I liked it a lot, both for damage (it beat Atomos pretty quickly) and just for variety with the somewhat repetitive berserkers. Nice info on the Rune weapons; I used the Rune Axe but didn't try to understand how it really worked. In-game it says "Uses MP for critical hits", which is certainly misleading. Part of the overall weakness of the Berserker class is the rather bad selection of axes and hammers. Swords and katanas are much better. They can use the Chicken Knife, but so can everybody else, and there is only one to be found.

I didn't use the Dancing Dagger once I had weapons with better attack values. Most of the dances were just annoying, especially against undead. Berserkers are random enough on their own.
I don't really agree on the weakness of axes/hammers. Sure, they lag behind a bit in the late game, but then they catch up again in the late late game, when pretty much everything has significant defense (consider Necrofobia: he has 50 defense, which an axe reduces by 38, which means that the Titan's Axe has effectively 91+38 = 129 attack strength, and that's certainly competitive). I'd also say that the weakness in the axehammer/Berserker connection is in the opposite direction: axehammers are weak because only Berserkers can use them.

Magic Hammer on Azulmagia was brilliant. I've beaten him before with Self-Destruct (which he will also learn and use, killing himself.) That was not permitted here and I didn't think to look for any other acceptable Blue spells. And Omega and Shinryuu we both did completely differently - you can read my report for those.

I think I liked your methods for the superbosses better. Much more dramatic.

-----

From your report,

Hey, yeah, Berserkers can equip shields - that should be pretty helpful throughout the game. Shields go underused in FF5, since fairly few jobs can equip them, and most of the time you'd rather have the offensive power of dual wielding or double gripping.

Another thing against shields is that there are so many other ways to protect against physical attacks: Armor status, Image, Elf Cape, weapon block, just plain high defense...
But for a class restricted variant there is usually nothing better to do with the left hand, and the Aegis Shield or some elemental immunity is very nice in the late game.

I lost a bunch of screenshots here again. This is the one pain of the VisualBoyAdvance emulator - it restarts the screenshot numbering every time you start the program, and will happily overwrite previous shots with no warning at all.

The version I'm using, VBA-M, does not have this bug/design failure. It does restart the numbering, but will respect already existing files.


[mathematical interlude]

Byblos would Drain for "240" which would outrace Galuf, but he only has 2/3 chance to respond with that, plus a small chance for Drain to miss its target. It took some time and several Ethers for Faris, but eventually Byblos took three straight hits without Draining (1/27 chance, but the battle had gone over 27 attacks by now).

Actually, since it's a 1 in 27 chance per three consecutive attacks, then 27 attacks only adds up to 25 sequences of three attacks... and since these sequences overlap, the probabilities are not independent, and calculating the odds of getting a streak of length three is kind of complicated.

I also got lucky that only one of the six Purobori exploded on the first time around (1/3 chance for each, actually comes to a 1 in 60 chance for just one out of six)

This one took a while to figure out how you were thinking. Since they have a one in three chance of exploding, the odds of getting one explosion is about 26% (((2 / 3)^5) * (1 / 3) * 6 = 0.263374486). Were you thinking that they have a 1 in 3 chance of not exploding, which would indeed give a about 1 in 60 chance?

[/mathematical interlude]

Tyrannosaurus: WHOA THAT WAS CLOSE! He dealt over a thousand physical damage, killing Faris then Galuf then Lenna in one hit each! Tyrannosaurus goes down instantly to a Phoenix Down, or quickly to fire damage, but this party could not do either (remember Faris is prohibited from inflicting death status on enemies.) But Bartz survived, with several attacks missing thanks to his shield and Elf Cape, and barely took down the boss!

You were more lucky than you might think with Bartz surviving, as those superattacks were ????, which is a magical attack, so it can't be blocked by shield or cape.
Of course, you were unlucky to end up in that situation to begin with. The RNG giveth, the RNG taketh away.


Nice job on the Gil Turtle, you definitely analyzed that battle more deeply than I did.

Got a problem though - Bartz and Galuf are wielding those Air Daggers, which heal the Air crystal!

The slightly silly but effective answer was to Mini them and let Lenna take out the crystal with her Dancing Dirk.

The strategic inflicting of status effects really was a recurring theme of this variant, wasn't it?

What jobs for the Exdeath fight? Time magic is a must, so that Faris can cast Reset if Condemn hits her. For the second slot I decided to try Blue magic, since he is vulnerable to Level 2 Old, and White Wind should be good enough for healing.

Good spot on the L2 Old, I completely missed that.


I noticed you were using mixes to haste in the final battle. You weren't using Running Shoes/Hermes Sandals? Undispellable haste is quite useful in that battle, and it is between the haste and the immunities the best general purpose accessory.

[T-hawk]

I don't really agree on the weakness of axes/hammers. Sure, they lag behind a bit in the late game, but then they catch up again in the late late game, when pretty much everything has significant defense (consider Necrofobia: he has 50 defense, which an axe reduces by 38, which means that the Titan's Axe has effectively 91+38 = 129 attack strength, and that's certainly competitive).

Yes, axes/hammers cut through enemy defense, but so do lots of other things. X-Fight, Spellblade (either into an elemental weakness or Flare), the Turtle Soup mix, Guard-Off blue magic, or even simple critical hits from a monk or katanas. Of course it depends on variant restrictions, but there are plenty of ways for swords to also pierce enemy defense. So that property is usually comparable, and then swords and katanas have higher attack values in addition to also being compatible with Double Grip and Spellblade.

Actually, since it's a 1 in 27 chance per three consecutive attacks, then 27 attacks only adds up to 25 sequences of three attacks... and since these sequences overlap, the probabilities are not independent, and calculating the odds of getting a streak of length three is kind of complicated.

This one took a while to figure out how you were thinking. Since they have a one in three chance of exploding, the odds of getting one explosion is about 26% (((2 / 3)^5) * (1 / 3) * 6 = 0.263374486). Were you thinking that they have a 1 in 3 chance of not exploding, which would indeed give a about 1 in 60 chance?

You are right on both of these. So for both, I got a little bit lucky but it wasn't like I hit some extremely remote chance of something.

I noticed you were using mixes to haste in the final battle. You weren't using Running Shoes/Hermes Sandals? Undispellable haste is quite useful in that battle, and it is between the haste and the immunities the best general purpose accessory.

I had forgotten that Neo Exdeath uses Dispel. Also I only had the one copy of the item, had not bought any more. Probably would have been a good idea for Faris, yes. I don't remember for sure what accessory she did have, probably either an Elf Cape or Protect Ring.

[Sofis]

Yes, axes/hammers cut through enemy defense, but so do lots of other things. X-Fight, Spellblade (either into an elemental weakness or Flare), the Turtle Soup mix, Guard-Off blue magic, or even simple critical hits from a monk or katanas. Of course it depends on variant restrictions, but there are plenty of ways for swords to also pierce enemy defense. So that property is usually comparable, and then swords and katanas have higher attack values in addition to also being compatible with Double Grip and Spellblade.

Turtle Soup and Guard-Off are inconvenient to use, and critical hits are too infrequent, I think, but I did forget about X-Fight and Spellblade.

[MJW (ya that one)]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOM8xYUTgn4



Milking in Civ3&4 has nothing to this!

[MJW (ya that one)]

Halicarnassus is MALE! Wow, he might be more effeminate than Kuja! If a character is not explicitly show to be female or male you need to do research because the graphics are so poor before ff7.

EDIT: I tracked down this JPN video where the character's speech has the Kanji "king" right after a "no". So the character says I am a King and King is not ambiguous in Japanese. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKY_E9lzdQ

[T-hawk]

I have another Final Fantasy variant to read. (If anybody looks into this forum rather than the Civ General forum which has become a catch-all for other games.)

http://www.dos486.com/ff/ff1style

[Sofis]

(If anybody looks into this forum rather than the Civ General forum which has become a catch-all for other games.)

I sure don't, but I do subscribe to this thread.

Regarding the golem battle:

Hey, what gives - no exp or gold from the battle? Bone and Zombie Dragons are worth rewards on their own! Well I can understand not allowing a milkable repeatable encounter like that. But how's it coded internally - there must be a special case check for this encounter to not reward the rewards?

They're different enemies. In the standard guide they're referred to as "BoneDragon (Golem Battle)" and "ZombieDrgn (Golem Battle)". They have to be different on account of the different AI script. There's a number of these special duplicates in the code. For example, the goblins you fight at the start are much weaker than regular goblins, having only a single hit point each, and being unable to use Goblin Punch.

Except that I couldn't get that to happen. Something strange was going on with the RNG. Reloading from the save, I would get exactly the same battles each time (with the magic party actually reaching the top of the tower without a single encounter, important for conserving MP) and the same results in each of them. Minotaur killed Faris on the third round of combat with a 755 damage hit every time. I tried to perturb the RNG out of its rut - fighting a few extra battles beforehand on different floors. That would shake up the Minotaur outcome sometimes, but only sometimes.

Allow me to quote myself:

When I had similar troubles, it turned out to be because of my method for loading the game, of all things. I'd just hold down fast forward and autofire-A, and instantly be back at the final save point. Very efficient. I got suspicious, however, when I got the exact same encounter exactly one step from the teleporter to the final area every time I tried it. It turns out FF5 initializes the RNG based on how long you spend on the title screen, so I was always getting the same sequence of random numbers. Could that have been the source of your trouble?

Twintania:

Wait... the algorithms faq does not list any immunity to Dead status nor Heavy flag during the "Charging" form. Is it that easy?


SUPER CHEESE TASTIC SPELL TO THE RESCUE!

And how appropriate to the variant: it's Tiamat all over again. :neenernee

Nice report.

[T-hawk]

Allow me to quote myself:

It turns out FF5 initializes the RNG based on how long you spend on the title screen, so I was always getting the same sequence of random numbers.

Yes, I remembered that, which is why I was trying to perturb the RNG by doing some different things. Actually I think the repeated results may have been just coincidence, Minotaur legitimately rolling the same damage on separate occasions. RNG problems didn't happen on any other battle including White Hole Exdeath that is usually the worst culprit.

BTW, there is certainly room for another player to try FF1style, with a different party composition.

Anyway, I have a few more ideas for FF5 variants and do want to do at least one more. The natural succession to that variant is FF4style. Cecil the Dark Knight/Paladin doesn't really translate, but there are still exactly four classes iconic to FF4, present in FF5, and not from FF1: Dragoon, Bard, Ninja, Archer. This is more suited for someone more familiar with FF4 than me though.

Live off the Land, though we may need an adjustment to what constitutes "Land". FF5 has free stuff available in towns and other "civilized" places like the pirate cave. My first thought is to say "no spending money except for inns" and allow all freebies, though that might leave the game a bit on the easy side.

Solo Nudist, naturally. (au naturelly?)

Some revision of the Brawlers: only fight commands allowed. But I want to expand it to other weapon-based commands like Aim and Jump, and also the later bosses seem impossible without some access to healing items and spells. Though maybe it could be done with self-heal tricks like Flametongue + Flame Ring. This is the one I want to do most, but need to nail down solid rules for it.

Or maybe I'll completely lose my sanity and go for the solo White Mage that Sullla doesn't seem likely to get around to.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Solo thief is much worse than solo white mage. See Gamefaqs!