Monday, June 18, 2012

Final Fantasy V: Stupid Idea

Over the weekend I watched the fourth crystal get shattered. On the plus side this gave me the rest of the jobs (except Mimic). On the minus side this released the big bad (X-Death) from his prison. On the plus side he didn't seem terribly interested in my planet and made a beeline for his home world. On the minus side his home world is also Galuf's home world and Galuf wants to go stop X-Death from doing evil things there. There's only enough power left in our meteorites to warp between worlds one more time so Galuf heads back leaving the other three members of my party behind.

WHY!??!??!?!

Clearly my party has no idea of the concept 'Never Split The Party'. If we'd all just gone together we probably could have stopped X-Death right away before he powered up again. Of course, it seems like it would have worked out this way, too. Galuf mustered an army and was in a great position to take X-Death down...

Unfortunately for him the rest of the party had other ideas. Without Galuf around we turned to Cid and Mid and got them to power up the meteorites for 'just one more' warp in order to send ourselves to Galuf's planet. (If we'd just gone in the first place then Cid could have brought us back and everything would be fantastic.) So of course we end up getting captured by X-Death and he uses us as hostages to buy enough time to power up his super shield and survive. So many stupid ideas from the characters.


Maybe a stupid idea, maybe just a way to make the game hard, but with Galuf gone from the party you don't run into any random encounters but you do have to fight three different and difficult boss fights. Galuf also took all his gear with him, so if you'd loaded him up with unique items you're just down those items for the boss fights. (He had my healing staff and one of my elf cloaks.) He was also the character I had leveling white and time mage which meant he was pretty much all of my utility. I was left with a sorcerer with 2-handed, a monk with +10% hp, and a thief with flee. Not the best for winning a long fight...

First boss fight is against 6 bombs. They sometimes explode for 3 times my max health. When you kill one, if any other ones are dead, it brings them back to life. There are, I think, 4 ways to win this fight. You can run them out of mana so they can't cast arise, you can hope they all explode without ever casting arise (and you rez up between explodes), you can use the trainer control action to make them explode each other, or you can kill them all at the same time. The no-healing, all single target damage party? Not able to win. I came back a second time with everyone as a fresh black mage and just nuked them all down with ice2 over and over. They all died at the same time (thankfully I burned them out before they started exploding) and I won.

Second boss fight has a death attack which does 500 damage to everyone. Most of my people have less than 500 max health. Fortunately I switched Lena back into a monk with +10% hp so I won this fight without having to try a second time.

Third boss fight is against a boss with two massive AE attacks and a pathetic melee attack. I had a white mage and a red mage for this fight and that wasn't enough healing so I died. I came back in the second time with two white mages and beat him up.

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