The new character is much better with the spell they start with, and it’s higher level than I have any of my spells, so I stuck with that.
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I’m pretty sure I fought two of those in the Dreadnought - one as a random battle and one from a chest. If not the same guy, then a very similar one. They even had other guys with them. Yeah, it was basically a boss battle… then the same boss battle on seriously diminished resources. The only positive was I got a lot of growth out of them.
Confirmed, that enemy is also listed as encounterable in the Dreadnought. Pretty rough.
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Yeah it was them guarding the chest. I saw at least one walkthrough saying to avoid it because you can get another copy of the item later and the fight is too hard to be worth it…
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You all start with a higher level thunder, huh? For the record it’s 2 on the famicom 
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I tried for another half hour, there is absolutely no way berserk is happening.
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Weird, I guess I got lucky. Magicians spawn in several future dungeons, so hopefully you’ll get one eventually.
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In Dawn of Souls (GBA remake of FF1 and FF2), she starts with Thunder 4 iirc
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なんとかなった
So the first time we stepped in the cave we must’ve had some bad luck and it was almost all Hill Gigas encounters. At least 4 of them in that short span. That’s why the cave scared me so much. This time they didn’t come out to play nearly as often, so we were ok. I did take the dead end path first, and admittedly happened to see the mention in this thread of the bridge, so I didn’t get to fall in that trap. Bit of a shame, almost. This feels more like an FF1 dungeon design with the distinctly branching paths making 2 trips here a good idea. We were doing so well on MP management I just continued after teleporting out of the bottom on that one side, though.
And we made it. The boss fight was a little scary at first. Honestly that 4 chimera fight is probably the best boss we’ve fought in this game. They hit hard and are scary enough I needed to keep up heals and try to prioritize getting some targets down, but they didn’t have any crazy defenses shutting my party members out of the fight. More a hard hitting slugfest than anything super unique but it felt tuned well for where I am.
Which, by the way, coming out of the cave, is here. We ended up doing excess prep for レイラ to be a half functional party member since I spent more time looking for berserk and the like. On that note, I’m disappointed to be switching back to Gordon cause I have her stronger than him.
The queen fight was fun but pretty chill; it is so striking how different it feels to be fighting a boss that isn’t coming at the end of an hour long trek through hell with no savepoints. I’m still pretty impressed by all the little twists and turns this plot has in mind for us, it’s super stripped down for sure but I’m genuinely compelled to see what happens next.
I have to spend a sizeable little chunk of time a lot of weeks making sure the party looks ready for a little difficulty jump, but I think I have a handle on the game now. Ready to be proven wrong and beaten up soon.
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cave boss
Like in FF1, usually these multi-boss encounters have a random number of enemies. In this case you could have faced between 1 and 4 of them, so you got the hardest fight.
I think I got 3 on my Famicom playthrough and only 1 in my current PR playthrough. That one barely felt like a boss fight…
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Response
Oh I didn’t realize, very interesting and kind of wild to make your boss fights that variable. It really was pretty scary and threatening when it took us a couple turns to focus enough damage to finish any. Bad enough luck and people could get focused down hard for sure. The way I had it it was tense and fun so I’ll take it.
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Yeah it was already a thing in FF1. For instance you could have between 2 and 4 psychodemons in the Swamp Cave defending the Crown. Obviously that changes the difficulty of the fight quite a bit…
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It’s crazy how often the dialogue changes in Altea. Sometimes they’re lazy and multiple characters share a line, but then other times they’ll have like 8 separate lines that can only be seen for a very narrow window before you advance the plot and they change again.
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And then sometimes you’ll enter a place with like 6 NPCs all repeating the same thing.
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Yeah it definitely feels like npc dialogue is handled in “clusters”. All guards will repeat the same things, all male npc the other thing, etc. there’s some outliers here and there. (The kids in this week both gave me unique dialogue)
Can’t quite think of another JRPG that decided to handle dialogue this way…
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Just noticed that there seems to only be Cottage in this game, at least as far as I’ve seen in PR version. Are there tents and I just never saw/found one? Cottages just replaced tents?
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Yeah it’s just cottages this time around. It’s strange that they wouldn’t keep tents or sleeping bags instead, since cottages are by far the least “realistic”.
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Week 5
Overall, I think this week was a bit easier than others. Well, except for the Hill Giants. Wow, I fought dozens of those guys. Guy does zero damage with axes on them. I’m convinced now that there must be a blunt/piercing/slashing damage modifier, after seeing so many enemies take zero damage from certain weapons, and hundreds from an otherwise identical generic weapon of a different type. Maria continues to bash faces with her mace, while Guy somehow has double anyone elses MP despite spending his time bashing faces and dropping particles. Leila… uh… soaked attacks sometimes.
Final boss was pretty rough, given it was impossible for me to remove status effects. I’ve never gone out of my way to grind stuff, but you can’t level up status cure spells without grinding. I’m not sure there’s an item to remove confuse or stun. I ended up just hitting her until she died in a race for the finish, because she barely had any HP. The four chimaera similarly used lots of stuns.
Did anyone else mention that this is the raciest scene I’ve ever seen in a Final Fantasy game? Sure it’s all pixelated, but even the honeybee in wasn’t this forward. Fauxhilda basically climbs into bed, takes off her clothes and makes come hither motions, while Firion audibly gulps and jumps into bed. Actually, I looked it up and I guess on the NES version he DOES get in bed. In my version he ran up next to the bed but that’s not fooling anyone.
Then Firion finds out that Leila was watching THE WHOLE TIME. Yikes. She claims she was being cautious but I’m not so sure.
Word of the Week
産卵場所 wins most specific word of the week
じらす wins most fun word, Oh Firion, don’t keep me waiting so…
もがき苦しむ wins LEAST fun word
and of couuuurse, the FF word for dragoon, 竜騎士. I suspect we’ll see this again often enough.
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Yeah leveling up esuna and basuna are definitely rough spots on the progression system. Unless you grind them they’re unlikely to level enough to be actually useful (especially basuna which I think needs to be level 6 to cure confuse). And because they’re not useful, you use them even less…
IMO they should get a big XP bonus when they successfully heal something. It would help keep them in line with the rest while not really encouraging grinding and spamcasting for the sake of XP.
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パンとサーカス
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Week 5 Play Report
I spent a good while just trying to find the island because I went to every island except the right one first. Almost got wiped out by a pack of werewolves in the process. Anyway, landed at the right island and looted the dragon knight castle. Then went into the cave and got lucky with finding the right staircase first try. Went back and got the egg and descended to the bottom without too much trouble. The hill giants really just seemed like a buff check - I just cast ブリンク, プロテア, and バサーク at the start of each fight and that gave me more than enough power to get through the fights. ガイ using the defence-lowering sword also helped. Through these fights ガイ has started building up his MP but it’s still pretty low overall. フィリオニール is turning into quite a respectable healer/buffer though. Everyone except マリア ended up getting their main weapon skills up to level 8 this week too.
The boss fight against 偽ヒルダ wasn’t too bad either - besides レイラ getting hit with confusion and almost killing herself in the middle of the fight.
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