🐋 Final Fantasy 4 - Week 7

Japanese Language Book Clubs
21

Pretty short week, which is good since it let me catch up instead of always being a few days behind.

Week 7
  • Steal is pretty useless. It basically only works on weaker enemies, and then gives you shit items.
  • I wish there was more variety in enemies or the random encounter rate was less. Doing the same fights over and over in a dungeon is tiring.
  • I didn’t really get the boss gimmick this week. Since spells take time to charge, it’s too hard to time my attacks with the opening, so I didn’t bother trying and just forcing my way through. Kain did get lucky and land his jump attack twice when the boss was weak though, doing 7k and 5k damage. For Rydia, I just used Bio over and over since the boss absorbed elemental attacks. And I forgot about the throwing thing, so didn’t do that. Maybe next week.
22
Week 7

Quite short but packed week, we get our latest party member and fight the last member of the 四天王.
As an aside, I like that we’ve been able to explore the ruins of Eblan’s castle since we got our first airship and see that it was absolutely *wrecked*, but find out what happened to it only now when you stumble upon the survivors in the cave next to it. It makes the world feel a little bit more organic and alive by showing that stuff happens offscreen and not just when our party is present. With Damcyan and Fabul we both happened to arrive right in time to see them get attacked, but for all we know, Eblan had already been bombed.

ルビカンテ is an interesting fight.
For those that didn’t quite understand the gimmick:
He is weak to Ice attacks when his cape his down and absorbs elements when wrapped in his cape.
He also absorbs Fire by default and all fire damage will heal him by 1, so if you use a fire spell on him healing him, he’s such a good sport that he will cast レイズ on your entire party, because he’s classy like that and believes in wanting a good fight (he even heals your party right before the boss battle!)
You can abuse this by using a quick Fire spell or elemental items to have him resurrect the entire party for you if they go down after his fire spam.
He will counter every physical attack with a Fira that hits the entire party, so the idea I think is to actually use the ATB system to your advantage by lining up the characters ready to attack and waiting for the right moment.
Have all the bars fills and then wait a moment on the upper menu (where time still flows) until the cape wrapping/unwrapping animation starts playing, so you can have Cecil, Edge and Kain hit at full strength one after the other and immediately get Rosa ready to heal the three counter Fira that will arrive.
Kain’s jump was too erratic to time so I had him stick to normal attacks even if they are quite weaker.
Rydia I actually used to cast quick Fire spells (lower tier spells have very quick casting time) to trigger the revive when his big Inferno spell would usually oneshot a character, but I also managed to get a couple of Shiva summons off when the cape was down.
Interestingly, he will sometimes cast Blizzara on himself to heal when the cape is up, but both times I summoned Shiva it seemed to break his AI because he would immediately cast Blizzara on himself even if the cape was down, hurting himself.
Was still quite a close fight!

四天王

Now that we’ve fought all four 四天王, I can infodump a bit on them!
Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia and Rubicante all take their names from a group of twelve demons in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
(Also, so does Calcabrina, the dolls we fought a couple weeks ago)
They are some of the few named demons characters, and are part of a group called the “Malebranche” (Evil Claws) that guard the fifth “bolgia” of the eight circle of hell, where their job is to punish corrupt politicians (or anyone else that uses their position of power for their own gain)
I wonder how someone at Square at the time even found those names to put it, since they aren’t exactly important characters. They are basically just namedropped and that’s it. There’s *some* correlation between their names and their powers: Rubicante means “red faced terror” so I guess it makes sense for a fire elemental, and Scarmiglione means “disheveled” so it can work for a rotting zombie lord, but Cagnazzo and Barbariccia (“Nasty dog” and “Curly beard”) seem to have been chosen at random.
Interestingly, there was another demon in the Malebranche named Libicocco which possibly references the Libeccio wind and could have fit Barbariccia more.
(That said, giving the name that means “Curly beard” to the naked demon woman dressed only in her hair was either a hilarious coincidence or definitely A Choice.)
Calcabrina means “Walking on frost” so again, seems random.

23

As a filthy
waaaay behind
catchup player,
who isn’t good at video games
I am so so grateful for spoilers that I can barely pull off even when I know about a helpful strategy
どうもありがとう, Sisthraさん
My good friend moved away who used to explain such things to me while I tried to play

24
Reply

Oh that’s funny! Even more funny that the game really hides this well, because if you followed the previous exchange you will never cast Fire on him. So basically it rewards people who didn’t read / understand the exchange or curious people that don’t want to be told what to do? (and I guess people who really did want to heal the boss)

That was so cool, thanks!

25
Reply

Yeah it’s definitely strange! It would have worked better if the cape actually switched his elemental affinities. He is weak to ice, so he wears a cape that nullifies it, makes sense, but as a trade off becomes weak to his own element and you have to realize it during the battle. (Maybe with some dialogue like with Cagnazzo, or with some back and forth banter that hints at it)
This way it’s a bit random.

26
Rubicante

I believe Rubicante is the only boss in the game I had trouble with. I lost to him at least twice. He takes his turns really quickly and keeps one shotting your people, so you take even fewer turns. Then when you try to raise them, he kills them with an AOE before you can heal them. Eventually I couldn’t keep up.

That battle would’ve been much easier if I’d known about the fire->raise trick. In the end, I beat him by getting down the rhythm of battle, raising my guys as quickly as possible. This fight felt more than any other like a dance whose steps I had to follow lest I fall behind. It almost feels like this battle is the headliner for the ATB system, because it wouldn’t work properly in the old turn-based system.

I can imagine it being absolutely crazy if you’re playing on Active mode.

In the end I had to beat him twice; either I had an issue with a save or missed something to transcribe for the spreadsheet. By the time I was done, I’d gone from getting my butt kicked to destroying him flawlessly in record time. My favorite battle of this game.

edit: I remember why; if you walk out the wrong door after beating him, you leave the tower forever and miss any treasures or bestiary entries. There was still a treasure behind the other door, so I had to reload and beat him again just to get that one treasure. Oh well, OCD strikes again.

27

Caves? Caves.

28
Week 7

Like others I struggled with ルビカンテ. I figured out the cape gimmick by mistake because リディア casting summons apparently made him cast ブリザラ on himself. Just so happened that it hit while the cape was down so did a fair bit of damage. But then did it again while the cape was up and he healed himself (though since I did a lightning summon he only healed himself of the ブリザラ)

Not too much in the way of story this week but I also enjoyed our edgy ninja companion. Shame he was useless in the boss because he spent the whole time dead and not worth reviving because he’d instantly die again

Having the king and queen be a gimmick where they overcome their transformation and refuse to fight was interesting

29

Oh my god. One of my friends show me this like 10 years ago and you just took me back.

30
Week 7

This week was a bit lighter. They really got their money’s worth from that tower tileset. When I was younger(20 years ago when the GBA version came out), I thought Edge was really cool but now his “ladykiller” persona seems a bit outdated. It’s a shame cause he’s pretty decent apart from that. At least he’s useful in combat and we’ve finally got our final party lineup.

Rubicante was fairly easy but I already knew the trick from playing this game at least 3 times already. lol Although the revive trick was something I never figured out so that was interesting to learn. Not too much farther to go. I think I can make it in time to start FFV with everyone.