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The Laws of the Universe Mean Nothing! Let's Play Some FFV Fanhacks! It's been almost a month since the fanhacks thread has been updated, so I've decided to start my own (no hookers or blackjack, alas), starting with The Final Fantsy V Ancient Cave hack. Is this another randomizer? Only so far as a rogue-lite (a procedurally generated dungeon where a full party wipe ends the run) is, and its called "The Ancient Cave" because it was inspired by the sidequest/miniquest of the same name in Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinestrals. Hopefully I will be able to get to at least one proper randomizer but since one of them is also an abyssonym project I'm not going to play that one blind lest there are any unpleasant surprises waiting for me along the way; so far I've just completed Barrier Tower without too much of an issue, though being paranoid I wasted like 2 hours running Atmos out of MP when I probably could have killed him while he was drawing Lenna in. Anyway, until I finish that playthrough I'll be streaming daily except Sundays on http://twitch.tv/dotwarner17 in the late afternoons/evenings EST. How does one play this hack?
 Loading any of the save files drops us in this little patch of desert (I believe it, in Vanilla, is where you'd fight Antlion). Walk back and fourth there until we get an "encounter".  Welcome to the ante-room of the Ancient Cave. There's a couple of NPCs, chests, barrels and Jars that do stuff if you interact with them:
After resetting to level 1, I decide to give myself the small mercy of not needing to grind the Chicken Knife, since many more classes can equip knives. (However, I was in such a hurry to push forward that I forgot to set the "Always Run" flag :smack:.)  Time for names. Since this is a first post, my leading man will naturally get the traditional SA default name of Dongs, and because I'm also super immature, I've renamed his companions to Poison, Jailb8, and Arr.   The first two treasure chests of the game hold the Knight and Ranger jobs. That means we'll be very tanky and eventually be able to hit super hard and get free healing. (At this point, I should have gone back to the heal pot to get a refill, but I forgot. :smack:)  The Cave entrance is "hidden" (though not very well, because you can see the passage as soon as you enter through the doors) in the wall next to the rightmost NPC. Follow the passage right, up, left, and speak to the invisible NPC there to enter the Cave.  Every journey down the Ancient Cave starts on this screen, but from here on out, the tilesets can be anywhere in the game.  Floor 1, regardless of what tileset used (this is...uh...somewhere in the Crystal section of the Void, but that's as far as I can tell) also comes with a 10:00 minute timer, as well as an emergency care package of 10 potions, 5 Ethers, and 3 Phoenix Downs. Each time you advance to the next floor, you gain 5 minutes up to a maximum of that starting time, and every 11th floor (so 11, 22, 33, etc.) is a boss floor that doesn't have a time limit, and the timer goes back to 10:00 on the next floor. This means that the optimal strategy is to grind encounters (which are, thankfully, scaled along approximately the same as vanilla plot progression) for 5 minutes on each floor and for 8~9 minutes on the floor before the boss fight. This is a pretty nice tileset to start with, since it's always guaranteed to have 5 chests. Opening them netted me the following:      A Great Sword, the White Magic spell "Cure" (which I can't use unless I have a White Mage, then level up some more and feed myself Ethers), a Soft, a Gold Helm, and another Soft.   Grinding on this floor gives me enough AP to learn Cover on all of my Knights, so I throw it on all of them so they can absorb hits for the Ranger if she drops to Critical. Meanwhile, the Ranger also learns !Animals (translated here as !Beast), and though she won't be pulling out any Nightingales until she hits level 10 I spam that since Squirrels do more damage than her dinky knife (so long as the enemy is not flying).   Floor 2 is the room right after the first save point in Barrier Tower. I pick up Moon Flute (a Blue Magic spell that can cause Berserk) and Regen (which I can't cast until I unlock Time Mage as a class).   I also pick up a Hayate bow as a random loving drop! Not sure if this was a rare drop in vanilla or it's part of the charm of the Ancient Cave, but either way,  This is one of the best bows in the game, both in damage and in function (as it has a random chance of procing Rapid Fire even when I use Aim). I also get a Leather Ring as a drop, which is the first accessory you ever pick up in vanilla, but it's better than nothing so I throw it on my Ranger.    Floor 3 pulls only the tileset from somewhere in the Deep Sea Trench, not the logic. The pickups I get are White Mage (I don't really feel like switching into it just yet since I'm pretty much killing things by Turn 2 and I have pretty good equipment on my Knights that only they can wear), a Fire Rod (no idea whether that'l see any use), a Bronze Armor (will probably be turned into money as soon as I can find a shop), and Sylph (which I will probably never use because I will probably have free healing by the time I get Summoners and the HP drain effect is not really worth the MP cost).     Floor 4 is from somewhre the Ronka Ruins but I don't recognize this particular room. The treasures are Emission (a Blue Magic spell nobody can use right now), FrogSong (more Blue Magic), a Chain Whip (unusable until I get Beastmasters), and the Time Mage job (with Regen as the only Time Magic I know and only 1 rod to my name I decide not to bother with switching anybody into that just yet).  I also learn 2-handed on all of my Knights, but I only give them to my sword-users. (I probably don't need to have Cover equipped at all since I'm pretty sure Knights have that as an innate ability and it only seems to trigger on whoever's in the first party slot, but better safe than sorry.)   Floor 5 (which is one of the floors in Walse Castle before we'd fight Shiva in vanilla) yields Power Song (useless until I have a Bard) and a Knife (sell fodder).  I believe this is the first floor that you can find Undead Husks, so if you're lucky you can get a few Elixirs into your stores.  Also picked up a Kenpo outfit after a battle, so I threw that on my Ranger.     Floor 6 puts us in that Ronka Ruins room again. This time, the chests yield a Soft, an Antidote, a Trident (I think that's a spear? Whatever it is, nobody can equip it), and Demi (probably not worth the MP cost, especially considering it can fail).     Floor 7, which has the Ancient Library tileset, has the following: Float, Flash, a Coral Sword (which goes on Dongs because even though the M. Gauche on Poison is worse damage-wise I like its chance to parry attacks) and an Iron Shield (with 2 Knights using double hand and the remaining one with a better shield, I'll probably sell it if I get the chance).  I also get a helmet that probably only casters can wear (or just isn't better than anything I have on already).        Floor 8 is from the Pyramid tileset. There's enough time for me to bump around the hidden passages to get all of the treasures, to wit: a High Potion, Remora, a Holy Water, the Thief job, another Holy Water, the Berserker job, and a Cotton Hood. Since I forgot to turn on the "Always Run" flag, !Flee will be a useful ability to have, and since Poison's still holding the M. Gauche, I change her into a Thief. I also change Dongs into a Berserker for the heck of it.    With a Thief in the party, I don't have to resort to emulation shenanigans to take nice pictures of the hidden passages that lead to the chests I'd opened.   Floor 9 pulls from the Phoenix Tower tileset, but both of these "jars" are now chests, one with a Gold Shield (that I throw onto Dongs) and the other with a Holy Water.  I fight enough battles to have Poison to have learned !Flee, so that goes on her posthaste.  Got an Iron Helm and a Silver Ring out of a random battle drop; the Helm I don't need but the ring is an upgrade for Poison.           Floor 10 puts us into the Castle Escape sequence and a cornucopia of chests, namely: a Bronze Helm (meh), Ifrit (if I can get a Summoner before I need to fight Byblos I can at least shut off his script), the Samurai job (Heck yes! Dongs is going into that post haste, and so will Jailb8 as soon as she learns Rapidfire), an Antidote, a monsters-in-a-box fight that yields Toad upon defeat, a Mithril Shield (the only person equipping a shield right now already has a better shield equipped, but it's there if I need two people to have shields), Mute (can't use), and Antidote magic (I forget if that's this game's version of Esuna or if it only fixes Poison, but anyway nobody's got any status ailments for me to test it).   While fighting the monsters-in-a-box Nightingale went off for the first time and healed more than 200 HP each...I believe that's better than even Cure 3 would net me at this level! I also get a Long Sword drop, but that's not a very good weapon so it'll go on the sell pile.     Dongs learns GilToss on this floor, but given how quickly I'm blowing through encounters already I'll probably not use it until I go lower into the dungeon (or just save all the cash for shops and/or the NED fight); I also pick up an additional Gold Shield as a drop fro the same battle.  Floor 11 is, as mentioned, a boss floor and it loads us in one of the mountain tiles (and checking the skeleton at the end of the bridge yields a Phoenix Down). All encounters here, therefore, only give AP, and so far I've run into the following:
* Karlabos and Cray Claw (i.e. both in a single encounter) * Siren * Galura (fortunately he is only the regular encounter version, but he still only gives AP upon defeat)   Since I'm pretty powerful I switch Dongs into White Mage and fight a few battles to get a bucketload of AP, also netting myself a Coral Sword when I steal from Cray Claw. This battle also gives a Frost Bow as a drop, so Dongs switches jobs yet again to Archer (and will probably stay in it until he learns !RapidFire).  Technically, I shouldn't be save-stating at this point, but I'd like to have it there just in case the emulator or the computer gives me problems and I can pick up exactly where I left off. (This proved to be the right decision since I suffered a crash while I was writing up the after-action report and I would have lost all of my progress if I hadn't done so.) Next update, it's time to push forward to floor 22, unless you guys hate the names I've given to the party enough to vote for new ones. However, since I've already logged more than 1 1/2 hours of gameplay, I'm not doing so unless I garner at least a total of 11 votes. Please put votes (6 characters max) in bold and the name of the unit you're renaming (Bartz/Lenna/Krile/Faris) in parantheses. I also haven't quite decided if this is just going to be a showcase run or a completionist one since I do plan to play some other fanhacks; I guess we'll see how my willpower holds up. dotchan fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Mar 15, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 01:25
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Ancient Cave:
Void Divergence (earliest release):
Void Divergence (newest version) 2 Randomizers, 1 Controller (Team SNES vs. Team GBA highlight reel): Career Day: dotchan fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 01:25
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dotchan posted:Jailb8 literally anything else what the hell
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Feb 13, 2020 22:25
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Bellmaker posted:literally anything else what the hell Consider this the second vote for anything except that.
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Feb 14, 2020 02:35
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Thirded.
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Feb 14, 2020 02:58
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same
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Feb 14, 2020 02:59
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Will you end up playing this?
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Feb 14, 2020 08:14
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This romhack looks cool as hell and I gotta try it out. Also Bellmaker posted:literally anything else what the hell
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Feb 14, 2020 15:44
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SGR posted:Will you end up playing this? Hm. I've vaguely heard of it, but never played it. It looks interesting; I will definitely scout ahead and give it a try. Man with Hat posted:This romhack looks cool as hell and I gotta try it out. It does require a certain level of tolerance for having your run ended suddenly because of events beyond your control, but otherwise it's definitely an interesting way to play FFV.
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Feb 14, 2020 16:11
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Bellmaker posted:literally anything else what the hell Agreed, and I'll cast my name vote for vanilla names for the girls, and name Bartz Butts.
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Feb 15, 2020 08:29
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Blaze Dragon posted:Consider this the second vote for anything except that. Add more to this pile. Also with all the Blue Magic showing up in chests, can you still learn Blue Magic the traditional way as well?
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Feb 19, 2020 01:53
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Ace Transmuter posted:Also with all the Blue Magic showing up in chests, can you still learn Blue Magic the traditional way as well? Very likely, but that doesn't sound practical given every floor the encounter table gradually advances and you only get anywhere from 5-9 minutes to grind encounters on non-boss floors. Still, I'll give learning magic from monsters a shot if I get Blue Mage. And man, I am starting to regret giving the entire party such tasteless names, because I really like these chest pulls. Oh, well. If I garner more than a total of 11 votes by Thursday 2/20/2020 12:00 PM EST (UTC-5), I'll be starting a new Ancient Cave run with Butts and the Canon Female Monikers (which totally sounds like somebody's Final Fantasy OST cover band).
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Feb 19, 2020 09:39
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Nth-ing the vote to change the names. I think this bumps it up to 7 votes.
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Feb 19, 2020 14:54
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change the dang names
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Feb 20, 2020 01:32
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All the girls' names need to be changed, but Poison only needs to be changed to "Poisnd"
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Feb 20, 2020 12:47
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Recording a fresh run of the Ancient Cave on twitch tonight. Come join me and laugh at my incompetence here.
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Feb 21, 2020 03:01
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"Good" news: We get to find out what happens when the timer runs out!  Bad news: I have to start a new run. Again.  Vote for names using boldface, with the character you wish to rename in parentheses, by Saturday 7 pm EST. dotchan fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 05:50
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Default names.
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Feb 21, 2020 06:14
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Keep close to default names, but add a number at the end that increases every time you have to restart because you got wiped out. It'd be a fun way to see how many times this group dies.
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Feb 21, 2020 13:15
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Dead, Deader, and Deadest, abbreviated as necessary. Which is which? You tell me.
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Feb 21, 2020 19:26
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Name Krile Galuf, just because.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:28
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bbcisdabomb posted:Name Krile Galuf, just because. 
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Feb 22, 2020 03:59
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 I happened to hit the Antlion fight between updates while deblinding myself on the Grand Cross Randomizer and realized I'd been mistaken about what tiles the Ancient Cave uses for its starting location, but checking the map, this area looks like it's close to where the Flying Ronka Ruins are, but as far as I can tell, the modders also made edits to the map.  While there weren't enough votes to force a name change, I decided to not risk the thread getting shut down in its infancy over pointless drama.  This time, the game gave us White Mage and Black Mage as the first Jobs. Despite having no spells to cast, Krile comes into the party empty-handed anyway so I threw her into Black Mage to start collecting AP and it wasn't until after I also changed Lenna to White Mage that remembered units don't get to go back into Freelancer unless I pick it up as a chest pull. Fortunately, Barts and Faris can carry the team.  I breath a huge sigh of relief when a Floor 2 chest yields Dancer. In vanilla, Dancer's utility lies more gaining the ability to wear Ribbons since Swordsdance is too unreliable to make Dancer worth using as a glass cannon (except in self-imposed challenges), but at this point in the game, every Dance is useful: Tempting Tango always Charms, giving me a bit of breathing room; Jitterbug Duet 1-shots pretty much everything for the next few floors and will keep me topped off; Mystery Waltz will, once I run into enemies with MP, give me MP to use whatever spells I end up with; and Swords Dance is overkill at this point (ironically making it not something I necessarily want to see out of my Dancers) but every enemy I kill is one that isn't hurting my party.  Floor 3 gives us a tileset we haven't seen before, the Ronka Ruins 4F treasure room (but thankfully there's no hole).  Having picked up the Berserker there, I decide to throw Krile into it for more reliable damage.  Floor 5 is another new tileset, the Forest of Moore (pre-fire), which has a nice collection of chests.  Nice! Getting Freelancer (called "Bare" in this translation) means we can wear any equipment we want at the cost of gaining no AP (which we wouldn't need if we could live that long anyway), so I decided to put Bartz and Faris back into Freelancer so they don't eat stupid deaths (but Krile does because I was too stingy with Potions  ). This also makes mastering Jobs worth doing. Getting Monk this early in the run is also really great for survivability, as Monks can counter physical attacks (which what most monsters will be doing until later floors), have higher crit rates, Kick as acceptable AOE if necessary, and high HP. (And, as I find out eventually, Monks have amazing synergy with Berserker.)  We pick up Magic Knight on Floor 6. Now Butz and Faris can switch to a class that won't die in a light breeze but can also gain AP towards mastery.  Seeing Geomancer is basically the equivalent of hitting a Zonk on Press Your Luck at this point, and given I'd just suffered through being forced to use a Geomancer throught the whole game as part of a self-imposed challenge, I had no intention of ever using it any time soon unless I had no other option.  This is the best floor to see in the Ancient Cave, because in addition to a massive number of chests to open, that jar is a one-time-use full party heal (dead allies come back to life, HP/MP refill, and status ailments cleared). I immediately throw Butz and Faris into Black Mage because now they can now sling spells with fairly wild abandon, since it's going to take a while to blow through all the MP I get from this jar and I can theoretically use Dance to keep myself topped off.  I pick up Mime on this floor as well. (Too bad I never get to use it.)   Krile, Berserked and wearing strength-boosting equipment, is doing more damange than every other party member combined (unless they all pull Swords Dance out of the roulette wheel).  Talk about lucky! I immediately get the same tileset on the next floor, and one of the chests had Cure in it, meaning my White Mages actually can do something other than chance the Dance roulette! (I also get Time Mage. Even if the RNG is weighted to give me more jobs on the early floors, this is absurdly good fortune.) I should have saved that heal jar for until I went to fight the boss, but being carried by Huge Krile was making me a bit complacent.  I was very surprised to see the Istory falls tablet dungeon tileset on Floor 11, since I thought that it was always the same room. But I'm not going to say no to more free chests or effectively free AP. With the Karlobos/Cray Claw dual boss the only one that can give me any trouble thanks to their ridiculous physical defenses, I grind encounters there until they stop triggering. Running out of enemies to fight took me by surprise, but on reflection, that makes sense--given that we have as much time as we want to burn on these floors, the game would restrict us from farming AP until we trivialized the rest of the game.  Floor 13 yields me the Thief job. Sucks to attempt stealing without a Thief Ring anywhere in sight, but with 2 berserked Monks dishing out the pain I can afford to have one party member potentially wasting turns. Faris is due to finish off another level of White Mage first so she becomes my dedicated Thief for the remainder of the dungeon as this also helps me see hidden passages and be speedier exploring large rooms.  Floor 14 is a layout we've never seen before, and though the tile set suggests Wind Shrine no room in there actually looks like this and I can't place it off the top of my head. ETA: CptWedgie posted:14F was part of the Island Shrine. Can't remember how many rooms in it is, but I'd recognize the layout anywhere. Thanks, CptWedgie! No wonder I couldn't place it, I just so happened to have skipped the Island Shrine on my last playthrough of the vanilla game and have yet to dive into it in my current playthrough.    Floor 15 turns out to be the Battle on the Big Bridge. This is a slighly tricky tileset to maneuver, since the modders turned the tiles that would have been scripted encounters into chests, and there are such chests in all three "columns" of the bridge, so navigating it invovles walking around until you bump into something. I picked up Bard, Samurai and Summoner on this floor, i.e., more Jobs that I never get to use.   Floor 17 had Beastmaster (called "Tamer" in this hack) and Red Mage (at which point I briefly nerd sniped myself wondering if I could even get 999 AP in the Ancient Cave).  Floor 18 had Nakks, so I took the opportunity to check if you can learn Blue Magic the traditional way. Answer: yes, but I don't know if I'd grind for any spells unless I had the time.  Floor 19 turned out to be a new room--one of the exterior floors of the Barrier Tower (I believe it's the room right before you'd fight Atmos) that has, as far as I can tell, no chests. This is not a room I hope to see often in the Ancient Cave.   Floor 20 (which gave us Wind Shrine entrance again) had Chemist and Dragoon.  And Floor 21 had Ranger.  Floor 22 is always the same tileset--the pre-boss room of the Fire Ship. While trying to figure out how to work the floor puzzle so I could reach the chest, I super-derped and left the room (because in Vanilla, that would have reset everything to default) and ended up not only cutting this floor short, but also skipping the next Floor because I happened to enter a single-door room and tried to backtrack once again into the Fire Ship. :smack:  Missing out on at least six chests (and I think one more in this room reminiscent of ExDeath's castle because I wasn't sure if I had enough time to backtrack for it) sucks for morale, but it's not a run ender, especially not when I have have every Job in the game except for Knight and Ninja.  And holy cow, look at that luck, this is the fourth time that I've run into this room layout! All I need to do is grab my bounty of stuff--    gently caress. What do I do now? Do I run? Do I try to thug it out? Butz is immune from the LilBreath attack, so he can keep Lenna alive, but if the RNG hates me I get LilBreathed several times in a row and everybody else is going to end up on the floor. At this point, I'm alternating between panicking, kicking myself, and resigned to the fact that I get to watch the timer tick down one second at a time. I Must Go, My Planet Needs Me (Didn't realize the mike could pick up the sounds of my controller clicking, but the settings I've played around with make it difficult for my voice to not cut out unless I talk like I'm speaking in public. Right now laziness is winning over good production values, so it's something you guys will have to put up with until I buckle down and get better sound-proofing and/or recording equipment.) ...man, that was a little soul-crushing to experience, even if losing a really good run to random bullshit is just part of the package when it comes to roguelikes, as well as overly cheeful death messages using dark humor to take the sting out of failure. 
dotchan fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 01:06
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dotchan posted:
Broken img tag here. Also I'm glad you're keeping track of how many deaths you've got because that will surely become a hilarious number eventually. I mean, I hope not...okay yes, I hope so, but that's the fate of LPs.
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Feb 23, 2020 01:36
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dotchan posted:
14F was part of the Island Shrine. Can't remember how many rooms in it is, but I'd recognize the layout anywhere.
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Feb 23, 2020 02:57
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Clearly the best time to run a roguelike where every second counts and a careless mistake can kill you is when I'm trying to stave off a nap so I can go to sleep and wake up at reasonable hours.  Watch me in all of my controller-clicking glory here or wait a couple of days for the after-action report. ETA: Anybody got any idea how I'm supposed to solve the Chimera Brain/Manticore battle at, like, half of the usual game level?
dotchan fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 24, 2020 22:15
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Blaze Dragon posted:Keep close to default names, but add a number at the end that increases every time you have to restart because you got wiped out. It'd be a fun way to see how many times this group dies. That's an awesome (and darkly funny) idea; I am definitely rolling with this naming scheme going forward. This number is going to get even larger than it otherwise might because, well, keep reading. bbcisdabomb posted:Name Krile Galuf, just because. Sure, why not. I don't know if I'd take suggestions to do a full rename shuffle, though. I'd just confuse myself trying to distinguish between [Insert Name Here] the unit and the character of the same name.   Welcome to the party, Bart2, Len2, Faris2, and Galuf2! If this naming scheme implies these adventurers to be clones, does that make me Friend Computer?   Because the Battle on the Big Bridge has such distinctive music, I take notice every time it shows up as a room. And apparently the Cave is also a fan of it, too, because not only was it on Floor 1, it showed up a total of 5 times this run. (Some of the other rooms also recurred, and I wasn't keeping an exact count, but I'm pretty sure this was the most commonly seen room.)   Floor 2 yields White Mage (ugh) and Berserker (good early game damage, synergizes well with other physical classes, makes grinding less annoying at the expense of not being able to do anything but attack a random target). Fortunately this is still early enough in the run that I can run with only two characteres doing anything, though since my attention was drifting in and out of the game, that meant the occasional plinking of tiny fists for single digit damage on each punch.  Floor 3 features a new tileset: the Void version of the Mirage Village pub. In addition to the jar on the left holding an item, the second barrel from the top and the second to last and last barrels also hold items. At the end of this floor, I switch one of my White Mages into Berserker as well so they can wear defense boosting equipment, shields, and also contribute to doing damage.  Floor 4 features a new tileset: a cave from...one of the mountain dungeons that I can't recognize off the top of my head.   Thanks to the way I died last run, I was in full mode when I saw the monster-in-a-box message on Floor 5. I ran into so many of these this run that I was even able to grok out a pattern--monster-in-a-box encounters seem to pull from somewhere past the next boss floor. In this case, I went from fighting enemies I'd find around the Wrecked Ship or so to the Walse Castle Shiva mini-dungeon. Fortunately with Berserkers and the good gear I'd accumulated, I never had a problem with any of the box encounters, but I still cringed everytime I saw the "Monsters!" notification pop up.  I also got Cure on this floor (among other spells, but from now on I'm only reporting stuff if/when it becomes relevant). At this point I'd lost enough HP and gained enough levels that I immediately burned my initial 5 MP per party member casting it once on everbody. This also put Ethers into consideration as a possible resource to burn if necessary, all the more so since the other chest I get is Magic Knight. At this point, I've only found Sleep, and with many bosses being immune to Sleep, that's only useful if I had hard-hitting magic to cast, but being able to equip swords and wear armor means my last remaining White Mage immediately goes into Magic Knight and all of my Zerks will also switch once they have Beserk learned.  Floor 6 features a new tileset: the last bit of the Wrecked Ship before the Siren boss fight, but you can't raise the sunken ship to move forward, so to go down to the next floor you go backwards (with regard to the way the game is played in vanilla). There's always only one chest in this room, but that's better than nothing.  Floor 7 features a new tileset: Exdeath's castle 4F. Because having the switch would require a logic check, the mod changed the treasure to be hidden behind a "secret" passage where the wall would have opened up to give access.  Floor 8 features a new tileset: some place I don't recognize. I pick up Blue Mage on this floor, but during this run I only dip in an out of Blue Mage to learn Blue Magic.  At this point in the run, I've been fighting so many battles that I noticed a neat quirk of the game engine: what !Berserk actually does is apply Berserk as a status at the beginning of a unit's turn; since Bart2's turn has yet to come up in this battle, he's not yet in that state of mindless rage.  Floor 9 features a new room: the room right before the Fire Ship puzzle. That treasure chest on the far right always comes pre-opened, as if to taunt us.  Floor 10 gives me a monster-in-a-box fight with Fire Ship enemies, after which I pick up Cure 2; this was reassuring to see, because I would be needing Cure 2 to heal starting from this point on.   Floor 12 has two monster-in-a-box fights with a single Zu, one yielding Freelancer--which I don't think I ever used, but oh well--and the other Red Mage.   Floor 13 features a new tileset: the Castle Karnak armory, one of the most treasure-loaded rooms in the Ancient Cave, because the two halves of this room are secretly bound together by a secret passage immediately to the left of the chest where I got Time Mage.  Floor 14 gives me a monster-in-a-box fight with the Page 32/64/128 enemy that yields Samurai. After a bit of thinking things over I decide to put Faris2 into that class so she can learn Coin Toss, because at this point I had yet to run into any shops and I wanted to have the ability to do emergency massive damage if necessary.   Floor 16 gives me the Heal Staff I was looking for and Beastmaster. Faris2 was already in Red Mage (having switched into it the floor previous for additional DPS) so she can quickly toggle between attacking and healing (usually from the back row if she has to heal more than one party member), while Len2 becomes my Beastmaster so she can eventually help me learn Blue Magic.  Floor 19 features a new room: 4 chests and a shop staffed by Boco. What's on offer changes every time you cancel out of the shop meny and talk to Boko again, but I don't know if the prices randomize; either way, you can by very good gear out of this shop...but only if you can afford it.  Back in Floor 22 and the proper way to do the switch puzzle: 1) right wall middle switch (where Faris is facing), 2) switch to the right, 3) last accessible switch (while riding panel), 4) Step 1 switch, 5) bottom switch (while riding panel), 6) switch at the end of the middle path, 7) top switch, 8) far left switch, 9) Steps 1 and 4 switch, 10) the only switch you haven't toggled so far (while riding panel).    gently caress. I should have remembered this from watching other people's runs, but I was so excited about the possibility of treasure that the encounter totally slipped my mind. Getting Doom Clawed meant Faris had no chance to heal anybody before she ate the dirt, and everybody else didn't have enough HP to win the damage race (and checking the replay, I'd actually done more than 3000 HP in my opening turn, and when I was down to Bart2, he was hitting for over 1000 HP each between heal turns; I definitely remember Siren being able to swap back and forth between her two forms during a previous runthrough, so this isn't just a matter of the Cave mashing together LF's all three forms, it's definite stat inflation to "balance" out the fact that most runners to make it this far are very likely to have a party that would otherwise coast through the vanilla experience).   has never been a more appropriate emote. Fortunately, I expected something like this to happen and prepared a save state, tenatively deciding that I'd at least try to reach Floor 33 and however far I can push myself for this party. I still haven't quite committed to only give myself one mulligan per run or save on every eleventh floor until I make it to the bottom of the Ancient Cave, but either way I'm counting all deaths towards the total. Next time: I hope I don't have to run this dungeon 14,000,605 times to grind out one win, but who knows! 
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Feb 26, 2020 20:39
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Watching the stream, I genuinely expected you to not go into the Liquid Flame fight with Berserk ready the second time...and yet, you did, and somehow barely won anyways. Had it been me, you can be drat sure I would've removed Berserk before opening any chest after how brutal that fight was. Control is more useful than DPS at that point.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:57
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Blaze Dragon posted:Watching the stream, I genuinely expected you to not go into the Liquid Flame fight with Berserk ready the second time...and yet, you did, and somehow barely won anyways. At 2 hours into stream, my brain fizzling out, and still salty about losing my party to a rash decision to open a Known Monster Box, it seemed like a good idea at the time. 
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Feb 26, 2020 21:07
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Last update, I showcased what actually lay on Floor 22, before dying because I wasn't sufficiently prepared for the optional Liquid Flame fight.   On the second try, I still ended up losing Faris to Doom Claw RNG, but with three Zerked units in better gear, as harder hitting jobs, and all topped off near max HP, that was enough damage to overcome Liquid Flame even after I was whittled down to one party member, proving that I could have taken this boss if I'd prepared better beforehand, but only because I had such good early chest pulls. As far as I know (I checked another guide to make sure), this always yields a Ribbon and the possibility of one or more random drops (I got a Crystal shield, which is endgame levels of good), but it's probably not worth getting unless you already have Dancers or enough damage/healing to live through this fight's bullshit. After the boss is defeated, random encounters can still occur (unless, of course, you've already run the floor out before trying the boss), so that's exactly what I did before going down the stairs.   On Floor 23 I pick up Geomancer (pass) and Ranger ( with the Hayate Bow I picked up yonks ago, that means a Berserked Ranger can randomly Rapid Fire ) Ancient Cave also taught me something very annoying about learning Blue Magic - it's not enough for Blue Mages to be in the party when Level 5 Death goes off, they have to be specifically affected by it (and then, I presume, brought back to life before the battle ends, but I never bothered to test that part because I decided it wasn't worth the risk to grab that particular spell).  Floor 25 yields Thief. I am bad enough at remembering hidden passages that I decide to switch--as it turns out, I am already always walking at double speed so Dash is useless, but if I was able to work my way up to Mug I would probably had a dedicated Thief trying to steal everything.  Floor 27 yields Knight.    The Island Shrine tileset came up again and this time, Dancer's a fairly middle of the road to low tier ability so I pass on it except as a hypothetical MP recharge should I run out of Ethers. Somewhere around here (I was Floor 29 when this happened to me), you start running into Skull Eaters. They tend to run away on the first turn, but the Cave has changed things so the party at least gets a pretty big pile of AP, but they hit like a truck if they stick around--and they have a whopping 90% physical and magic evade, so pretty much nothing except critical hits will work. I also realized I forgot to screencap the secret passage in this room. (If you don't have See Passages, line yourself up using the column adjascent to the far right wall.)  The Floor 31 encounter had a Dorne Chimera box monster. Fortunately I have the damage numbers to deal with him posthaste but holy cow that was terrifying to see.    Floor 33 puts us in Walse basement. Like vanilla, it's full of Gakimasuras that can take you by surprise, hit hard, and only drop a measly 1 Gil if you somehow manage to defeat them. Unlike vanilla, the treasures are in the row of spaces containing the jars (including, as I found out by double checking another guide, the empty spaces, necessitating you to go around and enter from the secret passage in the top to proceed); the treasure chest at the end of the room is always empty.  Dorne Chimeras start appearing as a regular counter somewhere in the neighborhood of Floor 38. I cannot nope out of this floor fast enough, but the encounters let up a few more floors down.  Floor 43 gave me Bard. When would I ever use Bard? The boss fights hit way too hard for me to dedicate a party member to singing shenanigans.  I was expecting Floor 44 to--in my exact words at the time--"have some sort of terrifying boss monster", but I was still not prepared for this level of . If I went into this floor properly prepared and with a good strategy (going through the stream to snag screenshots made me realize I had Mind Blast in my back pocket ) I might have been able to eke out a fight, but since I'd already used my one mulligan of that particular stream and I was rapidly running out of what good judgement I had left by that hour, I called it quits. At this rate, not only am I never going to make it to the bottom of the Cave in one sitting, I'm starting to think I might not get there, ever. dotchan fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Mar 31, 2020 |
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Mar 1, 2020 02:37
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Isn't that the fun of a roguelike? Dying constantly and horribly until finally, finally, things go well and you succeed?
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Mar 1, 2020 03:24
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The only other hack I know of this game is the one for the GBA version that gives ever job 3 slots. That one was a LOT of fun.
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Mar 1, 2020 03:26
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Blaze Dragon posted:Isn't that the fun of a roguelike? Dying constantly and horribly until finally, finally, things go well and you succeed? I know, but I keep forgetting that information is the most important resource in a roguelike and the only way to do that outside of spoiling myself, I have to use trial and error and treat my dungeoneers as expendable. Rabbi Raccoon posted:The only other hack I know of this game is the one for the GBA version that gives ever job 3 slots. That one was a LOT of fun. Oh, cool, I didn't know that the GBA version even had any mods outside of a randomizer (which I don't know if I'd put on my todo list since as far as I could tell from the streams I watched it's not that much different from the SNES version, it just puts the GBA jobs and items into the rotation).
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Mar 1, 2020 06:40
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I'll advertise my hack for the Advance version, it's mostly a bunch of mechanical changes, although I did add a new job (replacing one of the GBA jobs.) I also started working on an Ancient Cave mode for it, although it's still in early alpha; You can technically play a whole game, but it's missing a lot of polish.
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Mar 5, 2020 09:01
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(I didn't stream this run to eliminate one potential source of stress and distraction.) Before I send another group of adventurers down the cave, I need to make a couple of corrections on what the starting room contains.  First, this jar is not, as I thought, an HP/MP refill, but a flag to determine how the game sorts your items. When it flashes blue, that's the default Sort--everything reshuffles according to Vanilla should you order the menu to sort--but when it flashes green, the first four rows are untouched. This is a quality-of-life feature to make inventory management less annoying. Furthermore, I had the next to features backwards: it's the middle barrel that renames units and the jar immediately next to the left chest that toggles the run counter.  Finally, the barrel on the far left is not a dummy item: interacting with it from the bottom yields the stats the game keeps track for you, and as far as I can tell, the count actually persists through load states, since this group will be the fifth party I've sent down the cave. CptWedgie posted:Dead, Deader, and Deadest, abbreviated as necessary. Sure, but since this is a Final Fantasy game, we need to follow certain naming conventions...  Welcome to adventuring, Dead, Dedra, Draga and D-raja! (And whoops! I forgot about the numbering scheme. Oh, well. Note to self - next party will be #5.)  With such a naming scheme, this run is as good a time as any to experiment with just going for the chest pulls and taking whatever encounters that come my way (unless I face something that I think will cause a total party wipe). The Cave helps my adventurers go fast by giving me Thief on Floor 1; so long as I have a Thief in my party (and not always as I mistakenly thought earlier), I can move at double my regular walking speed and see hidden passages.  Floor 2 yields Beastmaster. I haven't yet figured out whether Beastmaster has any utility in the Cave outside of being able to do okay damage from the back row since Control is finicky and I don't have the patience for Catch, so I left that on the bench until I picked up a whip that didn't have poo poo damage.   Floor 3 yields White Mage (which I only used outside of combat for the heals) and Magic Knight ( ). Floor 9 features a new tileset, somewhere in the underwater dungeon.   Floor 10 features a new tileset, but I don't recognize it. It always contains two chests that have already been opened, and one of them can't even be reached at all.  Floor 11 yields Berserker. This time I decide that having 3 uncontrollable characters is not a good idea (even if having Berserk in the secondary slot of my other physical jobs boosts damage) and only put one party member into that Job. I also make a beeline for the exit because even Siren gave me trouble, and I didn't want to risk getting into the Cray Claw/Karlobos double fight.   Floor 12 had a monster-in-a-box fight that gave Ninja ( ) and a regular chest containing Ranger (right now I'm too low level to see Nightingale pop out of the !Animals roulette, but everything's still weak enough that I can use it in lieu of attacking).  The Exdeath castle room showed up on Floor 14 so I took the opportunity to screencap the location of the chest I missed the last time I passed through here; good thing I grabbed the chest this time, because it contained Freelancer.    Floor 16 features a new tileset and the other room I'm happiest to see outside of the Wind Shrine, because it has a whopping 14 chests (one of which yields for me Samurai, and another Blue Mage). Even if you are grinding on each floor, I suggest you run from battle until you've opened all the chests and then grind near the entrance, which also serves as the exit. (For some reason, my monitor crapped out after a battle on this floor, and boy did I panic thinking I'd lost a run to the LP curse. Fortunately, turning it off and on again fixed the issue.)  Floor 17 had a monster-in-a-box fight that gave Mime.  This time, I'm not strong enough to handle Liquid Flame at all, so I'm not even going to try, but I do grind a bit on the random battles to catch up somewhat on leveling.  Floor 26 yields Bard. Hard pass.    Floor 27 features a new tileset, a Meat Fort room diferent from the other transformed Exdeath castle tileset, with a secret passage in the lava, which to my surprise actually hurt like real lava. Huh. Wonder how the modders pulled that off. This floor also had Monk ( ) and Summoner (which I promptly forgot about in my hurry to move on). Floor 30 yields Knight. This gives my Monk something to switch into after their damage starts falling off.  Having Ninjas packing Preemptive and Flee (I don't think I had enough AP earned for Smoke at this point) made Waltz basement so much easier to traverse, all the more so since I know that the far left chest doesn't need to be opened.  Floor 34 features a new tileset, the cave in front of the pirate hideout.  Floor 35 yields Geomancer. Could have used that back on the damage floor...  Floor 36 yields Time Mage.  Floor 40 yields Chemist.  Floor 42 had a monster-in-a-box fight that gave Black Mage.  This time, I come into Floor 44 prepared. Dead is a berserked Monk, because though he can't be controlled he still is my biggest damage dealer. For direct damage, Dedra (Preemptive) and Draga (Dash) are Blue Mages who will be slinging Aqua Rake at least once just to see how much it hits (answer: not much because none of the Chimeras are flagged as desert enemies, the cheating cheaters) and then focus firing Mind Blast, and D-raja will be pulling the Animals roulette for healing when necessary, attacking when not.   In addition to Chimeras (which, thanks to Mind Blast, didn't get to unleash their bullshit on me and I also got very lucky that when they weren't they only used their physical attacks except for one Blaze), Floor 44 also has a Turtles encounter with Adamantoise, Land Turtle, and Grass Turtle. I decided to not hang around and look for the third possible encounter, namely: Tyrano and 2 Bone Dragons.  Floor 47 yields Dragoon.  Floor 55 is the Gilturtle cave, complete with Gilturtle "minigame". I don't think I can tackle Gilturtle (and I don't want to science whether Gilturtle would still be forced even after I run the floor out of encounters) so I just grind a bit before I leave.  Having long ago exahusted the item pool of Jobs, I was happily working my way down the cave when I ran into Tiny Mages. Unfortunately, this happened to be one of the enemies whose gimmick I didn't know about...  And of course, as RNG has it, my unit with Flee gets encircled before I can choose it as an option, and I'm far too low leveled to run away in a timely manner before everybody gets banished to...somewhere. Skipping the grind (except on Floors 22 and 55) ended up to be not too bad, but I have to wonder how luck-dependent this made my run. Still, it feels much less painful to wipe now because it represents losing a much lower time investment. But that's probably as fast as I plan to go--skipping the even numbered floors AND only going for chest pulls sounds like it'd require either ridiculous amounts of luck and/or savestate scumming, neither of which sound like my idea of a good time. Next time: I throw another batch of unlucky sods into the Cave, with name suggestions from you Goons. Please bold your suggestion, with the character you wish to rename in parentheses. Also, outside of bosses and rooms I haven't run into before, would you guys prefer a detailed report of when I got my Jobs, or would you not mind only seeing a report every 11 floors? dotchan fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Mar 5, 2020 |
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Mar 5, 2020 19:27
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Say when you get a job, it's a good way to imagine what you're doing with your party. Although in your place, I would've had someone running the Spellblade-Dual Wield-Rapid Fire route at all times since you got all the jobs needed. No name suggestions beyond returning to the numbered scheme.
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Mar 5, 2020 20:46
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Blaze Dragon posted:Although in your place, I would've had someone running the Spellblade-Dual Wield-Rapid Fire route at all times since you got all the jobs needed. Unfortunately that requires a higher amount of AP than I would've had the patience to grind for even if I wasn't just going for chest pulls.
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Mar 5, 2020 22:38
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FFVa also has an Ancient Cave-style hack, built on top of another rom that rebalances most of the vanilla Jobs and outright changes the GBA-only ones to give it more interesting utility. I will be streaming a playthrough of that this afternoon on my twitch channel.
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Mar 6, 2020 18:55
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Bard's !Sing ability can really shut down random encounters, assuming you can find the songs in chests? It would at least make the floors themselves easier with the Alluring Air and Romeo's Ballad songs. Bellmaker fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 6, 2020 |
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Mar 6, 2020 22:43
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Bellmaker posted:Bard's !Sing ability can really shut down random encounters, assuming you can find the songs in chests? Yeah, I can find songs in chests, but 1) I'd forgotten about those songs by the time I grabbed Bard and 2) I was hitting hard enough that I could solve most random battles I wasn't actively running from in 1 or 2 turns.
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Mar 6, 2020 23:48
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