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dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
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?

  1. Download the *.zip containing the hack patch and the *.srm save data, as well as an untranslated Japanese ROM :filez:
  2. Download and install an IPS patch installer.
  3. Extract the *zip, rename a copy of the *.smc ROM file the same name as the *.srm file, and put both of them in the same folder as your emulator.
  4. Run the patch installer on this renamed rom.
  5. Download the *.zip containing the English translation for this romhack.
  6. Extract the patch and run the patch installer again on the renamed rom.



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:

  • The first NPC on the left (beneath the "INN" sign) resets all flags, which means all of the other NPC toggles are to the default (and this may also make it possible for us to once again encounter certain events in the Cave).
  • The second NPC (beneath the Item store sign) resets everybody to level 1 (which you have to do to be able to enter the Cave at all).
  • The middle NPC (beneath the Magic store sign) just some flavor text and can be ignored.
  • The fourth NPC (beneath the Weapon store sign) is a shop you can use if you get super lucky in the chests (see below for more); each time you speak to the shopkeep, the items on offer reset so it's better to wait until you've opened the chests to talk to him.
  • The last NPC (beneath the Armor store sign) toggles whether or not you're guaranteed to run.
  • The first jar on the left (beneath the Inn NPC) is a full HP/MP restore.
  • The second barrel on the left (between the two jars on the left) sets the number of runs to 0 if the sound effect you hear is that of taking damage, or to 255 if the sound effect you hear is that of fleeing; this means you don't have to grind flee attempts if you ever find the Chicken Knife.
  • The second jar on the left (beneath the Item store NPC) renames your lead character; because of the way the translation patch works, everybody's names have turned into nonsense symbols, and whatever you rename them, it'll still display the corresponding Japanese hiragana/katakana in the battle result screens.
  • The two chests can contain equipment, items, magic, or Jobs. I haven't played this game enough to know what sort of drop list these chests are pulling from, but they have potential to hold some pretty good stuff.
  • The first barrel on the right (between the two jars on the right) is a toggle to skip the even-numbered floors if you want to challenge yourself; given how every bit of EXP helps, this is not recommended unless you've played through and beaten the Ancient Cave multiple times and want a challenge.
  • The second jar on the right (beneath the Armor store NPC) is a toggle to determine whether or not you gain experience; always say "NO" unless you're some sort of masochist.
  • The last barrel on the right is a toggle for whether or not you gain AP; again, this is not for anyone except the most hardcore of roguelike challengers.

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, :getin: 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.



:420:



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:

    * Wing Raptor
    * 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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dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
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

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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).

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Recording a fresh run of the Ancient Cave on twitch tonight. Come join me and laugh at my incompetence here.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
"Good" news: We get to find out what happens when the timer runs out! :science:

Bad news: I have to start a new run. Again. :cry:

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

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:


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 :sigh: ). 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.

:getin:

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.)



:fuckoff: 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. :sigh:



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--

:supaburn:

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

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
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. :smithicide:

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? :supaburn:

dotchan fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 25, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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. :downs:



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? :abrathink:



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 :supaburn: 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.

:getin:

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).



:bang: 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).



:supaburn: 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! :suicide:

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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.

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.

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. :shrug:

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
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 (:getin: with the Hayate Bow I picked up yonks ago, that means a Berserked Ranger can randomly Rapid Fire :getin:)



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. :getin:



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 :supaburn:. 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 :sigh: ) 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

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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).

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
(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 ( :getin: ).



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 ( :getin: ) 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 ( :getin: ) 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...



:supaburn: 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

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

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.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
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.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Bellmaker posted:

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.

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.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
We interrupt our regularly scheduled runthrough of the Ancient Cave hack to bring you another Ancient Cave, this time built on top of a mod that was briefly shown off in the Omnizerker Megathread, a mod that changes a whole bunch of things, including the GBA-only classes. Fortunately there's no double-modding involved, just download one UPS file here and apply the patch using your favorite patch-applying program on a Final Fantasy V Advance (U) rom. :filez:

(However, it is still recommended that you read the changelog for the mod. There's a whole bunch of information in there that I wish I knew ahead of time.)



This one starts a "new" game with Bartz parked in front of the entrance of the GBA bonus dungeon. Unfortunately, this means we can't ever rename him (or anybody else), but that's not a small loss all considered.



Should we go back into the sub, however, Zezat is there, thinking we're here to infiltrate the Barrier Tower. Don't talk to him, lest you cause a time paradox and be trapped in the sub until you restart.



The entrance to the cave lies down the path and then in the middle door once we reach this antechamber; to the left is a save point that doesn't really save you much walking should you TPK and have to start over (and trying to go beyond that gets you super-flattened by end-game level enemies); you can still quicksave in the dungeon proper, but since loading quicksaves destroys it, it's much more like a rogue-like pause button than the save scumming you can do with emulator shenanigans.



Like the SNES Ancient Cave, this mod loads floors randomly (though I think the GBA mod has a narrower pool for the starting room and chest, because I've seen this particular room of Exdeath's Meat Fort several times, and each time I've always pulled Odin out of the first chest that I checked).



Unlike the SNES Ancient Cave, this mod doesn't have a timer, pulls all of the floors from the game as they are in Vanilla, plus a bit of logic to determine which doorway counts as the "entrance" (which only determines where your character shows up on the map; if a doorway or staircase can be used in vanilla, it can be used in the Cave to go to the next floor, so move carefully), and lists each room as its location from the vanilla game. This makes keeping track of how many rooms I've traversed much harder. The game "balances" the lack of timer by setting the encounter table farther ahead (on Floor 1, I was already running into post-Ship Graveyard enemies) and, as far as I can tell, advancing it faster than Vanilla plot progression, as well as having an increased encounter rate (at least that was my impression - I don't think I was ever able to cross except for the tiniest of rooms without at least one random encounter.)



As soon as the party enters the cave proper, their inventories are stripped down to a Broadsword and Leather Armor each, 8 potions, and 4 Phoenix Downs. And while all of them remain Freelancer until they are changed out of it, all other Jobs are removed except "Explorer". This is, as far as I can tell, is an Ancient Cave-only Job that replaces Freelancer and is functionally identical to it, being able to equip anything and everything and having no statistical changes. The AP requirement there is even fake, as all that you earn upon learning it is a dummy skill literally named "Dummy Skill" (and it doesn't show up on the Skills list) and then you've "mastered" the Job.



...well, there is one thing that makes Explorer stand out as a Job--since it's using the Cannoneer sprite set and Galuf has no Cannoneer sprites, when he is in Explorer all that's left of him is his shadow. Spooky! :iiam:



Among many of the quality of life improvements the FFVA Ancient Cave carries over from the other hack is that Potions heal 100 HP, Hi-Potions heal 800 HP, and Ethers heal 100 MP. In exchange, Chemists have been hit hard with the nerf bat, but that doesn't mean much when Chemists can Drink and Mix their way into becoming lesser gods, so seeing that as my first real Job in the Cave made me pretty pumped about my prospects.



Playing this Cave has caused me to gain new appreciation into how much modding went into the SNES version--in addition to the timer and floor numbers, the modders also sprinkled in new chests all over the place (some of which are already opened or contain nothing, but still).



The SNES modders even added rooms unique to the GBA bonus dungeon (no wonder I didn't recognize it when it came up in rotation on the SNES Cave, I've never played the GBA version before and I've only skimmed a couple of Let's Plays).



The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

The Chain Whip always !Rapidfires. Whip it good!

The mod the Ancient Cave builds off of really likes Rapidfire as a skill; keep reading to see what I mean.



I pick up Blue Mage on Floor 5. I have Galuf switch into it just so he's no longer invisible, but until I have Blue Magic I can learn and better equipment to support Blue Mages everybody else stays as they are.



Floor 8 features a new room, Flying Ronka Ruins 3F, and two chests that can be reached which in this case one yields Knight. I ran into this room several times during this run, but the other times I came in through some of the other stairwells. I believe the Cave determines which entrance is used depending on the direction of travel when you pass through a doorway.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Knights get !White 3 on their tree. Their new tree is:
o !Cover (10 AP)
o !Guard (30 AP)
o Two-Handed (50 AP)
o !White 3 (80 AP)
o Equip Shields (120 AP)
o Equip Armor (150 AP)
o Equip Swords (250 AP)

I guesss that reflavors Knights as Paladins without changing the class name, but I'm not sure if that means the skill of the same name is removed from White Mage's skillset or there's intentional overlap between Jobs (which is...not a design decision I agree with, but whatever :shrug: )



Floor 9 features a new room, the Island Shrine tablet chamber, but there's never a boss encounter here. I also pick up "Hero".

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

New job: The Hero. Obtained at the Wind Shrine with the other Wind jobs. They can use any physical weapons except for swords and katanas. They equip most heavy armour and shields. Heroes have the following abilities:
o !Power Up (Initial, 20 AP): Casts one of Protect, Shell and Haste on themselves. !Power Up will avoid casting an existing buff, if possible.
o Super Armor (50 AP): Starts the battle with Protect and Shell, which are dispellable (via KO or the spell.)
o Super Speed (80 AP): Starts the battle with Haste and 2 layers of Blink, which are dispellable (via KO or the spell.)
o !Heat Vision (100 AP): Casts Atomic Ray at no MP cost.
o Super Strength (250 AP): Greatly increases weapon damage. Cannot be dispelled.
o !Ice Breath (400 AP): Casts Snowstorm at no MP cost.

It's basically a purposefully overpowered Job that acts as an incentive/reward for playing the mod. They even made custom sprites for everyone. Bartz is Batman, Lenna is Poison Ivy, Galuf is Wolverine, and Faris is Wonder Woman. Not sure what Krile's Hero sprite is--that will have to wait until I actually play this Mod, if I ever get around to it.



Floor 10 (and every 10 or so floors) is a store that either sells items, equipment or magic (I'm not sure about how the prices compare to vanilla, though) and the choice of shop either cycles based on some pattern or is loaded in at random. Once you enter the room, the way back out is blocked by a difficult fight; in the case of this first shop, it was a fight from the Big Bridge (which I didn't start running into as a regular encounter until starting around Floor 32), and I haven't playtested this mod thoroughly enough to know anything about what encounters to expect.



Floor 11 (a stony path that curves to the left and splits downward to a chest or upwards to a doorway) looks like either the Undersea Trench or another part of the GBA bonus dungeon.



Floor 12 features a new room, one of the caves in Hiryuu Valley. The path has two exits, but head upward to nab two chests "hidden" in a side path visible even without Thieves in the party. In this visit, I nabbed Time Mage, but since the only spell I could cast at this point was Demi (Gravity), I wasn't interested.



Floor 13 features a new room, one of the outdoors areas of Hiryuu Valley, complete with item hidden in a skeleton.



Floor 14 happened to load Meat Fort 4F, a room that shows up in the SNES cave but has the switch replaced with a hidden passage. Here the switch is retained as is.



Floor 15 features a new room, Meat Fort 3F.



Floor 16 features a new room, Ronka Ruins 2F.



Floor 17 features a new room; it looks like it's from the Ancient Library but I don't quite recognize the layout.



Floor 21 (or maybe 20? I double checked the footage and it's a bit confusing because I ended up in the same room twice in a row) is a Magic Shop whose exit is guarded by Rocket Launchers. Fortunately the shop had Meteor in an affordable price range, so I threw rocks at the problem until it went away and didn't have to deal with any of its tricks.



One of the chests in Floor 22 gives me Freelancer. If I had the patience, I probably would have started to master Jobs in earnest. :effort:



Floor 23 gives me Dancer.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Dragoons and Dancers have increased magic scores, to 24 and 29 respectively, to highlight their hybrid skill selection. Dancers also have 34 agility, making them one of the speedier jobs. Equip Ribbons will now pass the Dancer's Agility and Magic score, and Lance passes the Dragoon's Magic score.

:getin: (but only after I've at least gotten some Superarmor to put on my party, Dancers are still very much a bit fragile to put on the front lines otherwise)



Floor 25 gives me Black Mage. I don't have any high damage magic to cast so I will pass on grinding AP for it until I do or I get a better team composition to carry an effectively dead unit.



Floor 26 features a new room, not-yet-transformed Exdeath Castle 2F.



:psyduck:

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Several abilities that make a melee attack (Sword Dance, !Mug) may !Rapidfire 25% of the time. This is caused by the !Focus change, but I'm leaving it in for now.

:psyboom:



I thought the Hero no selling this Breath Attack like a boss was a hidden function of Hero not noted in Changelog, but then one of the devs of the mod came in and let me know that it was probably the effect of some equipment I had been wearing at the time. Never mind!



Floor 28 gives me Red Mage.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Red Mages get !Dualcast instead of !Red 3 as their default once they learn !Red 3 (i.e. at level 3.)
Note: This is applied when the battle starts.
o Red Mages get Time 4 in their skill tree. The new costs are:
o Red 1 (20 AP)
o Red 2 (50 AP)
o Red 3 (80 AP)
o Time 4 (120 AP)
o Black 4 (150 AP)
o White 4 (200 AP)
o Dualcast (300 AP)
o Red Mages Str is buffed to 38, up from 32.
o Red Mages Mag is buffed to 43, up from 32.
o !Red 1, !Red 2, !Red 3 and !Dualcast stat bonuses are adjusted to match the new Red Mage stats.

Well, this makes Red Mage definitely not useless, but I still don't like burning MP in random battles if I can help it.



Floor 29 gives me Bard, but I still wasn't too interested in trying it out. Maybe some other run.



Floor 30 is an equipment shop guarded by :supaburn: Liquid Flame :supaburn: . Fortunately, I don't think LF's stats were changed from vanilla, because I was able to finish the fight with one cast of Meteor.



And the fight nets me a Brave Blade. Well, I've already run from several fights, so I'm probably heading towards Chicken Knife Supremacy--

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Brave Blade's attack rating is updated from (150 - #escapes) to (#kills/4), capped at 200. Kills are only counted if you successfully win the fight.

:doh: That would have been nice to find out while I was running the dungeon and not when I was writing up the after action report. :doh:



Floor 32 gives me Samurai.



Floor 35 gives me Dragoon.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

Dragoons now innately have the Doublehanded skill and all the spears can be Doublehanded. I think there might be visual glitches in the status screen that doesn't highlight this properly?

That'd be nice if I had any good spears to equip.



Floor 36 features a new room, transformed Exdeath's castle 2F.



Floor 40 is an Item Shop guarded by Purobolos. I rolled badly on the Meteor lottery, so I had to slowly run these bastards out of MP. Fortunately most of the time they were too busy casting Arise on each other to self-destruct on anybody except Faris once.



Floor 42 features a new room, Istory Falls B2.



Curiosities of the Cave or emulator: for whatever reason, when I visited Moore's Forest a second (and third) time, triggering the way on had Bartz somehow produce a double to do the job for him. :iiam:



Floor 45 gives me Geomancer.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

o Geomancers have the highest magic score, at 68 magic, along with !Gaia passing this stat.
* Gaia is no longer dependent on the user's level. Instead, it just picks one of the four available spells for the terrain equally at random, and in a nod to Final Fantasy III, there is a 2% chance that Shadowflare (the chemist mix) will be cast instead.

Huh. Well I guess I'll try out Geomancer the next time I play either the Cave or the mod proper.



The Karnak treasure room showed up in the GBA Cave as well, but there's still no timer and, as far as I could tell, did not have a secret passage to the other side (and I rubbed myself against pretty much every inch of the dividing wall). At least one of the chests I could open had Ninja in it.



Floor 48 gives me Beastmaster. The mod has made whips better in general, as well as adding some additional effects to whips, but at this point I was having too much fun dancing to bother with other jobs until everybody had learned Dance.



Floor 49 (maybe; I'm not rewatching this thing to make sure I'm keeping an accurate count :effort: ) had an Item Store guarded by Gargoyles, which I solved in one turn.



Floor 52 gives me White Mage and Mystic Knight. Red Mage is good enough I don't need to switch to White Mage for healing, and I'm still too busy dancing to start working on Mystic Knight.



Floor 56 gives me Monk.

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

* Monks get !Time 3 on their tree. Their new tree is:
o !Focus (15 AP)
* !Focus may execute !Rapidfire 25% of the time. You still lose a turn charging up, though.
o Barehanded (30 AP)
o !Chakra (45 AP)
o Counter (60 AP)
o !Time 3 (90 AP)
o HP+500 (120 AP)
o HP+20% (160 AP)
o HP+30% (200 AP)

* Fists can be Spellbladed. Yes, now you can have your monks literally punch with fists of fire!
* Monks have innate Regen.
* Regen's rate is increased from (110 - Magic) to (60 - Vitality/2). The minimum rate is also decreased from 30 ticks down to 20 ticks. This effect is about the same as doubling the rate of Regen. The amount of HP recovered is increased to Level*(Vitality + 32)/8, up from Level*Vitality/16. For reference, a Monk will heal ~10HP per level.
* Monks have a x1.5 damage multiplier if they're attacking at full health.
* Monks now counter 90% of the time, up from 50%.

I wonder how good this makes Monk for the Vanilla endgame...



Floor 57 gives me Berserker. Well, I mean, having the power of rage is always nice for at least grinding...

The FFVA Mod Changelog posted:

* Berserkers, due to the fact that they only attack, now have their other ability slots freed up like Mimes. You can equip up to 3 additional abilities on them (although most of them won't be useful! :P)
* Berserkers (and berserked characters) are capable of using certain !Commands in battle if they have them equipped. The valid !Commands they can use are:
o !Focus
o !Mug
o !Jump
* Berserkers may freeze the game if they Jump. I don't know what is causing that yet.
o !Lance
o !Aim
o !Rapidfire
o !Dance
o !Mineuchi

:monocle:



Floor 59 is an Equipment Store guarded by Exdeath Whatever. What's the worst that can happen?



Oh. Right. That. :blush:



An embarrassing loss, for sure, but dying in this cave felt much less soul-crushing (or maybe I've finally started to embrace failure death the inevitable), given the levels of :getin: I kept running into each for. I am especially eager to revisit this Cave to see all of those changes to the vanilla experience I haven't actually tested yet to see how viable they are alone or in combination. Though the beginning of the game is a bit more luck dependent, once you survive a few chest pulls you're definitely in for a much leisurely adventure. Definitely worth trying out as a sort of "beginner's first roguelike" for people not generally into roguelikes or something for those wanting novelty, and for those of you who want a challenge, well, you can always just run from all of the encounters except for the Shop fights...

Next update will probably not happen on Thursday. No LP Curse (yet), but real life has gotten in the way. That means there's still time to vote for names.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Mar 13, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Bellmaker posted:

Red Mages getting White/Black4 is probably enough for them to be busted even without the magic boost? Bio, Blink, and Shell are pretty strong :psyduck:

Not sure they need Time 3 on top of that.

Most of the changes in this hack, at least on paper, seem pretty dang busted. Not sure Ethers needed the boost, but then I am generally rather stingy with magic, and of course there's the whole Rapid Fire Shenanigans...

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Did an offline recording of the SNES cave to Floor 55, will mulligan my way to floor 66 for scouting purposes before starting over, stream live here.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Starting another stream, hopefully things will go better than they did yesterday.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Blaze Dragon posted:

Also did you seriously get to the 19th run?

I was sciencing the possibility of an all mulligan run and not only did I waste a bunch of deaths failing the Liquid Flame fight, I eventually got walled hard in the 55-66 range because of a lack of good equipment, abilities, levels, or all of the above. The names after that run were an estimate, and by that last one of the night I was too brain-blasted to come up with anything.

Speaking of which, since I am sitting on a bunch of runs where I die, a lot and there's not much else new content to show off, vote for what you guys want to see: 1) a detailed chronicle of my failures in the same vein as previous updates, 2) just the corpse count and highlights of interest, or 3) move on to the next mod (and continue running the Cave in the meantime until I can make it to new content)?

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
The votes have come in for Death Montage (Plus Highlights), and there'll be plenty of deaths to montage!



Confident about my chances, I named a new party and got ready to tackle the Cave, this time deciding that I might as well do some scouting and see how far I can get, even if I have to mulligan my way through some bullshit deaths. I've put Bartz (named Goon6 in this run) in the back row because I gave his sword to Krile ne Goo6; until we get some Jobs (and everyone gains levels equally), she will always go first.



I drop a savestate on Floor 22. I am quite underleveled (Cave-wise) for Liquid Flame, but I was curious as to see just how overtuned the fight actually was. It's only Floor 22, how hard can an optional monster-in-a-box fight be?



Well, that didn't work. Maybe a different party layout?



I can get rid of the Iron Claws fast enough, so in theory I only have LF's BS to deal with (I think you get a couple of free turns, then LF casts a Fire 2 on random party member, self-heals with Fire 3, unleashes Flame on the whole party, and pokes a random party member with Finger; I haven't played through enough times to check if this is a set pattern or if LF randomly cycles among these four actions) but do I have a party with the kind of damage to out-race LF right now?



...nope.avi



This is why the count ended up so high in my later runs - if allowed infinite mulligans, my stubbornness kicks in and I don't give up when I'm clearly outmatched.



Ran into Tyrano (vulnerable to Missle)/2 Bone Dragons and 2 each of Bomb/Grenade/Purobolos (the last of the possible boss encounters) on Floor 44 this time, the latter of which wiped me twice because of unlucky Exploder timing.



At least it was "just" 2 Purobolos.



At last I made it to Floor 55, and the main reason why I gave myself infinite mulligans: to see if Gil Turtle can still spawn even after I'd run the floor out of encounters. Answer: yes. And also: ouch.



Darn. I was hoping to be clever and get a bunch of free gil to either buy things or throw at tough encounters. I guess that is not happening unless I super save scum.



In trying to make it to Floor 66, I eat 3 deaths on Floors 59, 63, 56, and 59 respectively. I was starting to regret my decision to skip the grind. At this point I can only fight once or twice without burning more time than I'd be comfortable with and that's not giving me enough EXP to catch up on being underleveled, and all the mulligans in the world were not going to help.



Though this run ended up not showcasing much new content, it did teach me that I have to be more flexible when it comes to the meta-stragegy of whether to grind and when, and in skipping out on EXP I am also very starved for the AP I need to gain abilities unless I'm willing to use a cheat code to unlock all skills.

Here is a quick overview of what Jobs I got and what party decisions I made (up to Floor 55):
  • Geomancer (1F) (Everybody except Lenna ne Gumli6 switched, and it was benched once everyone except Gumli6 learned Gaia, except for a quick dip in it to ignore 43F's lava gimmick.)
  • Berserker (6F) (Gumli6 switched, then Goon6 switched at the end of 44F.)
  • Beastmaster (6F) (Faris ne Guntr6 switched.)
  • White Mage (7F) (Nobody switched except for out of battle healing until 11F, at which point Bartz ne Goon6 and Guntr6 switched.)
  • Monk (12F) (Gumli6 switched once she had learned !Berserk.)
  • Samurai (14F) (Goon6 switched here and on 51F, and then so did Gumli6 on 23F--switching back in on 50F--and Goo6 on 33F.)
  • Summoner (14F) (Guntr6 switched on 55F for my attempt to fight GilTurtle.)
  • Mime (16F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Knight (16F) (Goo6 switched.)
  • MKnight (17F) (Guntr6 switched, Goon6 joined in on being an Magic Knight for my second and third attempts to get through 44F, and Gumli6 switched back into this Job on 55F for GilTurtle Science.)
  • Time Mage (17F) (Gumli6 switched on 44F and Goo6 switched on 55F.)
  • Blue Mage (19F) (Goon6 switched on 44F for my first attempt through that floor.)
  • Red Mage (23F) (?)
  • Bard (26F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Dancer (26F) (Goon6 switched until he learned Dance, then it was back to Samurai on 40F, and back again on 56F for the potential damage. Then Guntr6 switched into it after I finished going through 44F, and Gumli switched into it after picking up a pair of Red Shoes on 52F.)
  • Ranger (26F) (Guntr6 switched.)
  • Dragoon (26F) (Gumli6 switched - in retrospect, probably should have stuck in it until she learned Lancet, but oh well.)
  • Black Mage (29F) (Goo6 switched on 44F for my third attempt through that floor.)
  • Freelancer (30F) (?)
  • Ninja (31F) (Gumli6 switched, and she came back into this Job at the end of 44F.)
  • Thief (35F) (Goo6 switched, but I forgot that I'd bought a Thief ring for the precise purpose of putting it on a Thief when I get one. :doh: Goon6 switched into it on 49F because I couldn't remember whether or not I was already walking at double speed in the Cave and I had the giant 14 chest room to clear.)
  • Chemist (40F) (Goo6 switched at the end of 44F.)



Since the last run died an hour into the stream, I decided to keep going. Not having kept a close count of deaths, I just guestimated accordingly (and I turned out to have hit the mark exactly!).



Even though I was only getting every other floor's worth of stuff, I was doing better than expected, until I ran into Library enemies and forgot to check my level.



I took this as a sign that I should call it a night and come back to the Cave grind after I'd gotten some rest.

  • Dragoon (0F) (Faris/Far16, Bartz/Bud16, and Lenna/Lad16 switched immediately, then Bud16 switched back briefly on 9F and Lad16 switched in to ignore lava on 13F.)
  • Geomancer (1F) (Bud16 switched again and so did Krile/Kli16.)
  • Black Mage (1F) (Kli6 switched on 8F as soon as she learned !Gaia, so did Far16 once she learned Lance on 9F and Lad16 on 15F.)
  • Monk (9F) (Lad16 switched.)
  • Beastmaster (19F) (Lad116 switched.)
  • Mime (21F) (Stayed on the bench.)



A new day meant a new stream, with new party members to name (and because I forgot to change the flag, this ended up being another every-other-floor run).



Something I should have paid attention to the last time I ran through these floors is that TinyMages and CronoCons (i.e. Dim Masters) are, as it turns out, Fork Tower Magic Side enemies, meaning they have very unpleasant reactions to being hit by physical attacks.



Since I generally make it a policy to hoard MP, I basically don't use caster classes except as healers and very occasional emergency DPS, so I got super-flattened.

  • Black Mage (0F) (Bartz/Bort17 switched.)
  • White Mage (1F) (Faris/Buel17 switched on 13F and Bort17 switched on 45F after picking up a Cure Staff.)
  • Dancer (3F) (Buel17 switched here and back into it on 15F, then Bort17 switched on 13F, Rain17 on 21F and Cara17 on 23F.)
  • Red Mage (3F) (Lenna/Rain17 switched, then Buel17 switched on 21F.)
  • Beastmaster (11F) (Bort17 switched.)
  • Magic Knight (11F) (Krile/Cara17 switched.)
  • Thief (17F) (Rain17 switched, then Bortz17 switched on 21F--and back on 35F--and Buel17 switched on 25F.)
  • Monk (25F) (Bort17 switched, then Buel17 switched on 61F after learning Berserk.)
  • Samurai (29F) (Bort17 switched, then Cara17 switched on 61F.)
  • Blue Mage (31F) (Buel17 switched.)
  • Freelancer (33F) (Bort17 switched.)
  • Knight (35F) (Bort17 switched and so did Buel17, then Cara17 switched on 45F until she learned Doublehand on 61F and Rain17 became a Knight ins her place.)
  • Berserker (45F) (Buel17 switched.)
  • Time Mage (47F) (Bort17 switched.)
  • Geomancer (61F) (Bort17 switched to ignore the lava gimmick before switching back to Time Mage.)



This time I made sure to toggle all the flags properly.



...I didn't need to have bothered, since it turns out monster-in-a-box encounters can spawn as early as Floor Freaking 1, and the party was on 1 HP because of lava and laziness. (As if to warn me, the Cave even gave me White Mage and Time Mage out of the first two chests.)



Such is the Ancient Cave. Some days you get endgame items out of your first chest, some days you wipe on a single digit floor because rng hates you.



For the last run of the night I didn't bother renaming anybody except Bartz, leaving everyone else on their default names, all of which are just some combination of kana and in-game symbols.



When Prototype popped out of a monster-in-a-box fight, I decided it was not worth trying to fight it and abandoned whatever I would have gotten out of that chest.



This run I learned: monster-in-a-box encounters can be bosses, if the rng lines up. I thug through Turtles without a problem...



...but I could not win the Chimeras damage race nor run away before I'd get Aqua Raked to death.



I'm not mad, just disappointed.

  • Knight (2F) (Faris switched, then Krile switched on 4F and Bartz/19 on 5F, and Lenna on 11F.)
  • White Mage (4F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Geomancer (7F) (Lenna switched briefly into it for one fight on 11F.)
  • Red Mage (8F) (Faris switched.)
  • Thief (9F) (19 switched.)
  • Samurai (13F) (Lenna switched on 14F.)
  • Dancer (14F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Monk (15F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Blue Mage (23F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Dragoon (25F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Mime (26F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Ninja (31F) (19 switched on 33F)
  • Chemist (34F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Black Mage (34F) (Stayed on the bench.)

Updates will continue to be every other week until real life stuff clears up, but at least I'll have plenty of runs to report back about, including at least one more run of the GBA Cave.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Next time I'll leave Bartz's name as default to see what it is, until then, enjoy this GIF:

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Updating early because of how this run ended, but unless something similar happens in future runs I am still on a (more or less) biweekly update schedule.



As promised, Bartz was left in his Ancient Cave default name (A♪i in the menu, バ♪i in post-battle results screens), but everybody else was renamed to reflect the continuing corpse counter.



And a combination of more patient game play and good pulls meant I finally made it to Floor 66 in one try, and had the resources to deal with the boss...



Omniscient AND Minotaur. I didn't test it, but it's safe to say Omniscient definitely still has his gimmick of resetting if you try to use anything that's not classified as magic. Fortunately, I happened to be sitting on a pile of Elixirs for the very purpose of getting past this hurdle, so I threw All the Spells at them both (and found out that Minotaur absorbs Water elemental magic, but fortunately I'd put enough damage into him that he was still felled soon after) until they died.



Winnning this battle nets you Meteo, definitely worth having if you have a Time Mage (and it's very rare that you don't at this point).



Starting around Floor 68 or so, you start seeing Undersea Trench enemies. If you have Bard and Requiem, this is an execellent opportunity for speed leveling.



As far as I can tell, Floor 77 features just about every non-Fork tower optional dungeon boss; this time around, I ran into Jura-Avis and Azulmagia/Mindflare/Mindflare, the latter of which stunlocked me with Time Slip and caused me a TPK.



This was a wipe I probably could have avoided if I prepared properly ahead of time, and I did drop a save state so I could give myself at least one mulligan; might as well go right back in and shuffle my party around with the above encounter list in mind.



The second runthrough of Floor 77 had 2 Archeoavis encounters and a Kuza Beast escorted by 2 Bandercurls.



This was another entirely avoidable death - I should have chucked some more Phoenix Downs at my party so there would be a cushion against Roulette, but I played way too risky.



That's what mulligans are for, I guess.



Back in Floor 77 again, I ran into two new bosses: Wendigo (tedious but not a problem) and Twintania (whose opening Tidal Wave took me off guard but I couldn't have prepared against anyway because I only had 1 Coral Ring so far).



Kind of sucks that all I could do was eat a death (or maybe try to run away, but I lost the party member with the guaranteed escape skill in that initial volley so IDK if I could have fled the conventional way even with "Always Run" turned on), but such is the Ancient Cave.



Floor 88, in addition to having Void encounters (that also give EXP), features the hardest optional bosses in the game and endgame level equipment. The upper left chest is the Chicken Knife, guarded by Omega, Prototype, and Mechhead; the bottom chest is a Ragnarock guarded by Shinryuu and a Crystal Dragon. I probably could have taken the Omega fight using three Bards and Krile as a dual-wielding Magic Knight, but only having one Coral Ring means I'd get super-owned by Shinryuu; I ended up skipping both.



...I really should have just run from this encounter but I was packing just enough DPS to tempt fate.



My punishment for being complacent was to get Meteored in the face when down to my last unit.



Finally, Floor 99. I set up the party for what I hope is the final battle: Fern21 is a Magic Knight with Dance (otherwise I'd be wiffing with regular attacks), Bartz is a Knight with Doublehand, Rin21 is a Bard with Animals (in retrospect, she should have packed Blue Magic), and Krill21 is a Dancer with Swords-Dance boosting equipment and Dual Wield.



Phase 1 is pathetically weak, so this is the time you use to set up your party with buffs, because as soon as Alt Roit falls...



You face a super-buffed, super-fast Zeromus who can use Neo Exdeath's full aresnal of attacks and still has NED's fake targets, making Rapid Fire not very useful. Or, if you have Mix, you can throw Baccus' Wine on Alt Roit and skip the phase shift.



Beating this boss is just a matter of singing myself All the Numbers and not accidentally mis-clicking to end Phase 1 too early, so this is not a slog I am going to inflict on you guys. On top of this, the way out of the Cave is still blocked by one more fight I am way too weak to handle--Omega and Shinryuu.



I don't know how much of my struggle is just me being impatient versus the Cave suffering from the sort of stat inflation endemic to fanhacks, but either way I'm pretty much done torturing myself with this hack.

  • White Mage (4F) (Bartz switched as I'd picked up a Heal staff earlier, but everyone else stayed in Freelancer, then Fern21 switched on 57F.)
  • Time Mage (7F) (Bartz switched on this floor and again on 55F, then Fern21 switched on 66F.)
  • Samurai (7F) (Faris/Fern21 and Cara/Krill21 switched, then Rin21 switched on 47F after learning Rapid Fire and back into it on 74F.)
  • Ranger (8F) (Lenna/Rin21 switched.)
  • Ninja (16F) (Fern21 and Krill21 switched, then Krill21 switched back into it on 20F and the first try of 77F and Fern21 switched on 43F after learning Mug.)
  • Monk (16F) (Krill21 switched so I could experiment with putting Barehanded on Ninjas--as it turns out, Monk-style damage is already being out-scaled by the equipment I had on hand, so Monk went on the bench after that.)
  • Thief (18F) (Fern21 switched.)
  • Dancer (20F) (Klill21 switched on 56F, Fern21 switched on 59F, and Bartz switched on 66F.)
  • Dragoon (20F) (Bartz switched.)
  • Blue Mage (23F) (Bartz switched on 32F.)
  • Geomancer (26F) (Klill21 switched to ignore lava gimmick, but this Job was not used for leveling until 44F and then I started rotating everyone except Bartz into it so they could have something to do as casters that didn't use MP.)
  • Chemist (26F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Berserker (28F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Black Mage (30F) (Rin21 switched on 44F and 66F to fight the bosses there, and Rin21 and Fern21 switched on 55F to deal with Fork Tower magic side enemies.)
  • Bard (30F) (Fern21 switched to fight 44F encounters, then switched for grinding on 70F and eventually so did Rin21.)
  • Mime (32F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Freelancer (Klill21 switched on 99F).
  • Summoner (35F) (Klill21 switched on 55F and 66F to fight the bosses there, then on 59F after learning Dance.)
  • Beastmaster (37F) (Stayed on the bench.)
  • Magic Knight (40F) (Bartz switched on this floor and back into it on 72F and then Fern21 switched on 75F.)
  • Knight (42F) (Fern21 switched on 72 F and Bartz switched on 75F.)
  • Red Mage (76F) (Stayed on the bench.)

Next update: GBA Cave Shenanigans.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Apr 9, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Live on twitch to run some GBA Cave.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:


Since it's possible to enter the GBA cave with pre-set jobs and I'm super indecisive, I selected four of them at random. (And I also got to see what sprite Krile uses for her Superhero job--she's Dr. Doom.)



And finally, the first room is not that one room in Exdeath Castle Meat Fort, so where you start is probably somewhat tied to initial Job selection.



I somewhat mentioned it in passing while playing the SNES Cave, but both it and the GBA cave feature either somewhat randomized enemy drops or a raised rare enemy drop rate: in this instance, I pick up a Flame Bow and 3 Goliath Tonics from a 3 Skeleton/1 Mindflayer fight.



Floor 8 features a new tileset, one from the bonus dungeon. Of all the floors I've run into so far in the GBA dungeon, this one has the most chests.



It wasn't until I reached the Floor 11 shop (which sold magic) that I realized White Mage comes pre-packaged with Cure, making them actually useful to bring as an initial Job. As before, it was guarded by the same enemies.



However, I don't remember if the post-fight drops are always guaranteed to be the same, but I will take that endgame sword and spear, thanks. :getin:

(Whoops, I thought I screencapped this before I deleted the video to save hard disk space.)

Floor 23, a weapons shop, was guarded by 2 Flamethrowers this time. So much for my theory that each boss floor always had the same bosses, or had the same general "tier" of bosses.



Floor 34, an item shop, was guarded by Ifrit.



Floor 44, a weapons shop, was guarded by Soul Cannon (who to my surprise/dismay was immune to water elemental spells, as I was hoping to solve the problem with Leviathan).



Floor 54, a magic shop, was guarded by Grand Mummy (a Pyramid encounter).



Floor 65, an item shop, was guarded by Exdeath. Fortunately, I'd picked up Flare a few floors earlier, so that gave me more things to throw at Exdeath.



Floor 75, a weapons shop, was guarded by Melusine.



Starting from Floor 78, I was running into enemies with broken palettes, and I was not in the mood to science what they were (they turned out to be Sunken Walse Tower enemies) so I just ran every time I saw these things.



I was not expecting Floor 86 to be guarded by, of all people, Forza and Magissa.



I was also not expecting Forza to hit like a truck. :fuckoff:



Well, that's going to take some brainstorming about how I can get past something of this caliber...

Since the GBA doesn't number the floors for me, I had to keep a manual count and then double check in post - so instead of posting a list like I've been doing, I have put what Jobs I picked up and what Job-changing decisions I made into a Google doc.



At some point I may try to assemble some sort of "dream team" to go down the cave, but for now, I'm content with choosing randomly (and avoiding repeats).



The Floor 11 shop fight took me by slight surprise, as I was expecting to see 3 Lil' Chariots again. I also got a different after-battle reward, but it wasn't anything to write home about so I skipped screencapping it.



The Floor 22 shop fight was Flamethrower.



The Floor 32 shop fight was Liquid Flame again, but the Floor 42 shop fight was Titan, who got super-flattened by a 'Zerked Galuf in Monk.



The next three shop fights were also repeats (Gargoyles, then ExDeath), but after that I started getting some fights that played the boss music and I didn't recognize these encounters.



The Floor 85 shop finally saw a different encounter than any of my previous runs, namely, Halicarnassus, complete with the gimmick of turning everybody into frogs on turn 1. Good thing I'd been buying, picking up, and stealing Maiden's Kisses so I was sitting on a pile of them.



While trying to grind, everybody kept getting turned to stone so many times I ran out of Softs, I didn't have a White Mage to cast Esuna, and the equivalent Chemist Mix wasn't working. This put me down a party member going forward. :ohdear:



But even if I had all four party members, I probably would not have lasted that much longer as it felt like I was getting at almost double turned by Necrophobe and his Barriers.



This kind of sucks, too, because I vaguely remember having at least two Reflect Rings to my name.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 14:10 on May 15, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Live on twitch and will be using mulligans for scouting purposes.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Can Of Worms posted:

So, funny thing about the mix that cures petrification. Turns out it's not designed to target petrified characters so it's impossible to actually use it to cure them. :pseudo:

Well, that's good to know for future runs.

By the way, how deep does this Cave go? Because I've been using mulligans to scout ahead and the dungeon just keeps going past NED, but 25 floors in and I have yet to see another shop.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Real life distractions are over, so I can focus on what's really important: playing video games! :unsmith:



Having pretty much seen every class the mod has to offer, I decided to forgo the dice and construct a party to go down the cave.



My choice of Thief confirmed that it has innate Haste and not as an effect of anything they're eqiupping. While this is a nice QOL improvement, I kind of wish there was some way to make Steal 100% successful and/or some way to guarantee a rare steal.



I think this is the first time I've seen a Floor 11 shop fight that didn't have Lil' Chariots in them whatsoever, but it's still from about the same general place in the plot Lil' Chariots would be spawning.



The Floor 21 shop fight was a new encounter: 2 Flame Throwers.



The Floor 42 shop fight was a new encounter: Manticore.



I was not expecting to run into enemies that hit harder than any party member had maximum HP so early in the Cave.



Nor did I think I would lose the damage race, and I was saving my mulligan shenanigans for further down the dungeon. Whoops.



Trying again with a fresh party, this time making sure I started leaving save states before each shop fight starting from Floor 33.



Bard starts the cave with Mighty March (the regen song) and Alluring Air (the confuse song) and the starting harp replicates the effect of !Animals (including Nightingale, once Faris is past level 10). However, since I didn't pick up any other songs until much further down the cave (and Bard was also not available on anyone else for a good chunk of my spelunk) Faris ended up being my only singer.



The Floor 11 shop fight was Garula. With Dancer as one of my starting jobs and having come equipped with a Lamia's Tiara to improve the chances of Swords Dance, he lasted only as long as Galuf stopped shimmying.



The Floor 22 shop was a single Gigas encounter from the Karnak castle escape sequence, meaning that the jaunty shop tune played over my battle (not that said battle lasted very long, but it was still funny to experience).



The Floor 55 shop fight was a new encounter: Dragon Pod.



The Floor 75 shop fight was a new encounter: Triton/Nereid/Phobos, and on my first try I kept loving up distributing damage properly and ate a bunch of counterspells I didn't need to.



On my successful fight, I switched Bartz into a Blue Mage for Might Guard and Lenna into a Red Mage to track HP so I could finish them off properly, but even then the occasional stray Rapid Fire meant one of the three would drop before I was ready.



Necrophobia still causes me to eat a death, but on the second try, the RNG works in my favor. As it turns out there's no Gilgamesh to rescue the party, so I had to chop through all of Necrophobia's hit points myself.



Once you hit Floor 100 (by the mod's reckoning--I counted at least 105 distinct rooms, though some of the rooms may be considered to be a singular "floor" by some mysterious means I haven't grokked yet :iiam: ), you run into the (current) final boss battle of the GBA Cave, Tree Exdeath (and his final form Neo Exdeath).



I got flattened by NED twice, both times due to triggering his enraged phase thanks to not properly tracking how much damage I was doing.



The lesson having been learned, I set up my tree felling party for maximum survivability: Bartz is a Summoner with Lance so he can keep himself topped off with MP, Lenna a Dancer with Superspeed (I only had two Hermes Sandles to my name and those went on Bartz and Galuf), Galuf a Blue Mage with Mix, and Faris a Knight with Sing. If it would have occurred to me to try the Kiss of Blessing mix to skip the NED phase, I would have done so, but I wanted to beat the Cave legit--well, as legit as someone with functionally infinite retries can be, anyway. (And good thing I didn't, because that was one of the bugs that got fixed in the GBA port.) While Faris gave everybod regen with Mighty March and then started singing what I assume to be a rocking metal song to boost levels, Galuf fed the party All of the Resistances and used the leftover Dragon Fangs to make max out Bartz's level (I checked this by using Lance and stopped feeding him Dragon Powers once his numbers stopped going up). Then Bartz dropped his Wonder Rod to punch Faris out of level-boosting song and she then switched to the speed-boosting one and the rest of the party started chopping through TED's hit points.



NED tried his best to kill my party, but I was both prepared and lucky--none of the elemental magic could touch me, Grand Cross never caused a TPK, and this time I kept an actual spreadsheet (which I put on my layout as I decided to stream the final battle, but I forgot to turn Octopus Buddy Cam on until later into stream) to avoid NED going into rage mode. Whenever I needed to heal or reapply buffs, Galuf was on hand to provide, and if anybody other than Bartz died, I would have him cast Phoenix, dealing ~4200 damage to all of NEDs parts and bringing back the fallen party member to full HP (and if Bartz ate the dirt, I just had Galuf mix a Resurrection). Thanks to the extra levels, I had so much DPS that I left Faris to sing longer than she probably needed to, but eventually she joined in on the NED hacking fun.



There were even enough Dragon Fangs left to stuff Lenna full of Dragon Powers until she was hitting the damage cap, and she finished off two of NEDs parts at once when her Swordsdance proc'd Rapid Fire. The other two parts fell soon afterward.



A multiple mulligan victory is still a victory for the purposes of this LP, but I definitely enjoyed this version of Ancient Cave enough to want to revisit it on a casual basis.



The Cave technically keeps going after NED, but it's more of a victory lap than anything else; while you can still encounter enemies, earn AP, EXP, and GIL, as well as open chests, no more shops will spawn. So until/unless the mod updates, Bartz clone number 32 and company are technically stuck in Cave limbo until I wipe or get bored.



And on that cheerful note, that's as much of the GBA cave you'll see unless I put it into my non-LP stream rotation (whenever I get around to doing non-LP streams again :downswords: ). Next up, since I don't want to do two randomizers in a row, is Void Divergence.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Apr 16, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Blaze Dragon posted:

Regardless of mulligans, congratulations of beating one of the hacks!

Thanks. I definitely want to beat the GBA Cave for real, but for now, other mods are waiting to be showcased.

Speaking of which, I forgot to ask you guys about what I should name our lead character.

You have the following choices:

1) Good old standard Bartz or Butz
2) SA Standard Goon or Dongs
3) Comical Third Option

For any of the above, you can also vote whether or not to continue tracking the number of parties (with the number going up in future playthroughs as I get TPKs).

dotchan fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Apr 16, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Can Of Worms posted:

Glad you enjoyed the Advance Ancient Cave! This playthrough got me to do a bit more progress with it, I started working on getting floor titles displaying as well as music related stuff, like having a specific track play for each floor set.

Cool! Let me know when you're done so I can send another party to die horribly because I'm bad at video games do some intrepid adventuring.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Live on twitch until about 7:00 to play through as much as Void Divergence as possible.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Being mostly a FFT fan, I know next to nothing about the FFV modding community, both in terms of how active it is and what tools they have to do their thing, so I'm very thankful that SGR recommended that I try out Void Divergence because though I was aware that it existed before I started this thread, I'd forgotten about the specifics.



Because I am impatient and don't want to get hung up on the grind, I've turned the game to its easiest setting and lowest encounter rate (only cranking up if I feel like I need to push myself to the next level and/or mastery level).



The beginning of the game isn't all that remarkable, since you can just keep selecting Fight like in vanilla and totally ignore the icons now on the user interface. (However, each enemy now has particular innate elemental strengths and weaknesses.)



So I didn't do anything I wouldn't have otherwise in vanilla except rename all of the characters by switching them into lead member and holding L and R while I bring up the menu. I couldn't settle on a theme other than "remember [insert game here]?" so unless you guys want something else, I will be exploring Void Divergence with Tiz, Sarah, Claire, and T.G. (and eventually Aloser).



I wasn't planning on saying anything about the plot since it wasn't changed at all, but as far as I can tell this is a different translation than either the fan translation I'm more familiar with or the GBA script.



The game gives everybody more HP; in exchange, WingRaptor (1566 HP, weak against earth/cold) will hit harder and harder as its special moves (Breathwing, Storm, Claw) all cause the Wind element to build strength on the field.



The Item menu is also on a cooldown so your characters can't spend every turn sandbagging; in exchange, everybody automatically heals some amount of HP I haven't bothered to check after the end of each battle.



Now Void Divergence really starts to distinguish itself. Eventually (the mod is supposedly still in progress) every character will have a set of jobs that suits their personality (for whatever reason, the Mod decided that Faris would disdain Blue and Black Magic, Bartz can't be Monk or Thief, Lenna eschews Knight and Thief, and Galuf is without White Mage), but for now the custom Jobs don't seem very functional. ::iiam::



Each Job (which is free to equip any combination of weapons, shields, armor, or accessories) also has its usual primary ability put in place of the Fight slot, leaving all three subsequent slots open to mess with as you wish. Since my physical fighters are going to need to toggle weapons constantly to match enemy weaknesses and I haven't learned any abilities, that means everybody except the Blue Mage (who has switched Item out for Scan) is rocking Fight, Brave (restores a bunch of MP, the character immediately takes another two turns in a row as if they had Quick, and after that they are much slower to take the next turn), and Item.



At maximum encounters, not only is the rate increased, but each encounter has more enemies in it. Minimum encounters looks fairly vanilla in terms of enemy formations but it makes for much faster traveling between regions.



One level's worth of quick grinding later, I'm ready to throw myself at Karlobos (1146 HP, weak against poison/thunder), expecting to get pasted a million times due to Tail Screw shenanigans, but the extra HP and the lowered difficulty setting means I breeze right on by him, which suits me just fine.



It's in Ship Graveyard that I experience another feature of the mod for the first time: everybody, including caster classes, start at 10 MP (20 in Tiz's case probably because he's a White Mage).



Siren (2070 HP, weak against earth/flame) was given some more toys to play with (and kept her gimmick of switching in and out of Undeath), but otherwise she, too, didn't present much of a problem.



Since I have not played any of the Bravely Default games that the mod cites as an inspiration, for me each battle is a bit more like tabletop DnD, where with each encounter I'm rummaging through my bag of holding to find the most effective weapon for the task at hand.



Not sure if it's an adjustment of the mod or just me being in the wrong equipment, but Poison ticks are much more dangerous now. (Hopefully this means Regen is also amazing.)



By the time I reach Magissa (1067 HP, weak against wind/holy) and Forza (1556 HP, weak against poison), the elemental weakness system makes for a much quicker fight (but again, I am on the lowest difficulty level).



And at lowest encounter rate and with a much beefier layer of HP, I can sneak in and out Walse basement much easier (though it still took me two tries because I forgot to put a quick escape ability on my party the first time around, found myself unable to runaway from the Jackanape, and didn't want to sit around waiting to die).

Since I'll be getting another set of jobs after beating Walse Tower, I will leave the playthrough paused here until the next update.

Wind Crystal Jobs overview:
Monk
Usable by: Lenna, Galuf, Faris
Stats (this is from the mod-provided reference; I have no idea if this is a straight improvement compared to "Commoner", this game's equivalent of Freelancer, or what the stats turn into if you change into that Job at level 1): 25 STR/26 AGI/28 VIT/21 Mag
Level bonus: VIT, VIT, HP - not yet implemented (see below for details)
Innate: Brawl
Default ability: !Kick (Water elemental by default, but takes on the element of equipped weapon)
Abilities: Brawl, !Kick, Counter, !Mantra (i.e. !Chakra), HP + 30%; Monks can also equip !Teach (I haven't used this yet, but the description is "teach ally to counter", so I'm guessing it allows everybody to use counterattacks without having to put Counter on everybody)
Dot-chan's Impressions: It remains to be seen how useful Monk will be in the later parts of the game, but I have high hopes.



The Job leveling system now works more like Final Fantasy Tactics--all Jobs level at the same rate, each level gained gives boots to particular stats (though, according to the mod, not all of this has been completely implemented for all classes yet), and at certain set points I haven't paid attention to, the character learns the next ability they haven't picked up yet. Since certain characters are locked out of particular classes, this will make each character even more distinct other than their very slight innate advantages and disadvantages. This also immediately makes all Jobs better since each Job's level bonus ties into what stat it's using to calculate skill effectiveness and damage formulas, so I don't know how much of an improvement this will make Monk in the long run, but so far just being able to switch weapons and take advantage of the mod's elemental rock-pappers-scissors system means !Kick is now pretty great for blasting through regular encounters.

White Mage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Faris
Stats: 20/26/22/29 - not yet implemented
Level bonus: AGL, MAG, MAG
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !White
Abilities: !White, Heal Boost, !Recover, Mass Cast; White Mages can also equip !Aero (which, well, does what it says on the tin) without having learned either !Blue or picked up !Aero as a Blue Magic and Turbo MP, which when equipped gives an additional 10% starting MP.
Dot-chan's Impressions: I still don't want to put White Mages on the front row if I can help it, but being able to hit things for more than a light tickle is really nice.



White has also gained a 0MP Holy elemental spell called "Dia"; not sure how much damage it does normally since I threw it at Undead Siren, but having Dia gives White Mages something to do other than sit there and twiddle their thumbs if they are done buffing/healing and I don't want to have them move to the front row and hit things with weapons.

Blue Mage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Galuf
Stats: 23/22/26/26
Level bonus: VIT, MAG, HP
Innate: Learning
Default ability: !Blue
Abilities: Learning, !Blue, Bulwark, Lich, !Control; Blue Mages can also equip !Steal.
Dot-chan's Impressions: It's Blue Mage, which will be as broken as it ever has been as soon as I take the time to pick up those spells.

Thief
Usable by: Galuf, Faris
Stats: 24/28/25/23
Level bonus: AGL, VIT, HP
Innate: Caution, Passages
Default ability: !Steal
Abilities: Caution, !Steal, !Smoke, !Mug, Politics (no idea what this does); Thieves also get Crit Up as an equippable ability.
Dot-chan's Impressions: With Dash available on default, this frees up a slot, but for now, Thief's main utility is still in Steal.

Knight
Usable by: Bartz, Galuf, Faris
Stats: 25/23/27/22
Level bonus: STR, VIT, HP
Default ability: !Stomp (does damage and attracts enemy attention; I'm not sure if that's only the enemy attacked by !Stomp or if all enemies will now target the character using it)
Innate: Cover
Abilities: Cover, !Stomp, !Guard, Bulwark (no idea what this does yet), Two-Handed; as a Knight, always has !Mantra available even if the character hasn't learned it from Monk
Dot-chan's Impressions: I haven't used this class much, but it does feel like !Stomp makes Knight that much more useful as a tank, especially since it's harder to set up the vanilla strategy of having three characters in critical HP and having the Knight covering for them while shrugging off damage via !Guard.

Black Mage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Galuf
Stats: 21/24/23/30
Level bonus: MAG, MAG, MP - not yet implemented
Default ability: !Black
Innate: Two-Handed
Abilities: !Sleep, !Black, !Osmose, !Fury (no idea what this is yet, maybe the Berserk spell?), Area Cast; Black Mages can also equip Two-handed.
Dot-chan's Impressions: With elemental weaknesses in the mix, Black Mages are now even more glass cannon-y than ever, though being able to equip anything mitigates that somewhat. Still, with MP restores costing action economy to build up, it's not a job I plan on using any time soon.

Crusader
Usable by: Bartz, Galuf
Stats: 29/25/28/18
Level bonus: STR, STR, HP
Default ability: N/A
Innate: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: According to the mod info, this class's growths are not yet implemented and I have no idea if they're planning to give them any skills, so after trying it out a bit I gave up on using it.

Tinker
Usable by: Lenna, Galuf, Faris
Stats: 29/20/26/22
Default ability: N/A
Innate: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: Same issue here.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Apr 22, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Blaze Dragon posted:

Huh, interesting mod. It seems it wants to change quite a bit, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. That said, limited MP at the beginning of the fight...I hated it in FFTA2 and I doubt I'd enjoy it here.

It definitely makes casters less attractive to use in the early game.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Live on twitch for more Void Divergence.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:


A correction about the leveling system - every time a character levels up in a Job, the amount of AP it takes to gain another level goes up for all Jobs, and you get a maximum of 30 Job levels. I don't feel much of a need to min-max, but I will definitely have to pay attention to what levels I'm getting so I don't lock myself out of Job utilities I'd like to be able to use.

Void Divergence classes.xls posted:

* each STR/VIT/MAG/AGL up gives +1 to that stat
* each HP up gives +30 base HP before VIT bonus
* each MP up gives +5 base MP before MAG bonus AND +3 MP at the start of battle
* spell abilities !White, !Black, !Red, !Time, !Summon are now only learned once and grant access to all their spells (if learned) like !Blue
* the following abilities--Two-Handed, Brawl, Dual-Wield, Evade, Magic Shell, Heal Boost, Magic Amp, Learning, Pharmacology--once learned, are always active for all classes



I wanted to give Shiva (2375 HP, weak against earth/flame) a shot before I climbed Walse Tower, and she proved to be no obstacle, especially since Black Mage gets to cast Fire for free (good thing, too, because the MP you get from using Brave doesn't persist between turns).



Against Garula (1728 HP), I tested Stomp, and while that does make the Knight a higher priority target, it doesn't spare the others from taking a hit, so it was a good thing that I packed a whip that proc'd paralysis quite a few times. (I also didn't notice that I'd resized my captions while streaming a different game so there was a little bit of overlap with the game until I got to Karnak. Oops!)



Now that I had Berserker available, I immediately wanted to see what the mod did with it except...TwinCut (Berserker's default ability, which is supposed to attack two targets at random) is literally broken--not in that it trivializes the game, but that it randomly causes the game to softlock (or at least the game becomes more or less unplayable whenever this graphical glitch happens--it put Stop on my entire party once, zombied my entire party twice, and at least once, the screen just went completely blank).



"Infuriating" is an understatement. I refuse to think of this as a feature. Until whatever is wrong gets fixed, Berserker is intolerably annoying on the overworld and completely unusable in dungeons. Which is a shame, because Berserker is actually controllable now and it would have been nice to see what TwinCut actually does outside of borking everything.



Meanwhile, Time Mage has two additional spells - "Bleed", a fire elemental spell that probably causes Sap, and "", a spell that defaults to allies and does...something? :iiam:



While trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with Berserker (because I really, really wanted Berserker to work) I took the opportunity to try the hardest difficulty, and as it turns out it just inflates enemy stats. (Instead of one-shotting Wild Dogs when using their elemental weakness, I was only doing 1/2 damage instead.) I don't care for this sort of "hard mode", so I set the difficulty back down to the lowest.



Bulwark gives 10% Max HP and 10 VIT...which might be useful against something that hits really hard, I guess, but ehh?



At Karnak, White Mage gets another attacking spell, the lightning elemental Smite.



Liquid Flame (5262 HP, weak against water/wind/thunder in human form, water/ice/earth in tornado form, thunder/poison in hand form) favored the human form for whatever reason, so I was able to focus him down fairly quick.



In Burning Karnak I grabbed my second Elf Cape, the Ribbon, and Esuna (forgetting that Man Gauche was also worth getting); between Karnak and the Ancient Library I tried out the Fire jobs, but they didn't feel that much different from vanilla (other than the obvious DPS boost due to being able to use all weapons and take advantage of elemental weaknesses).



(!Mantra, being Holy elemental, probably needs both compatible equipment and field elementals to be worth it, so I'm not going to bother.)



Ifrit (4573 HP, weak against water/wind) wasn't too much of a problem thanks to all of the extra levels I got while grinding for money to buy Karnak's stache of weapons and equipment.



While traversing through the Library, Galuf mastered Thief and learned Politics (double items, probably from enemies that can drop items). Nice utility, but it's staying on the bench until I have to grind for drops.



Byblos (6333 HP, weak against holy/flame)--despite his bigger pile of hit points--was also not an issue, even though he hits harder than anything I've run into so far, has Comet as part of his bag of tricks, and as far as I could tell I could no longer freeze him up by throwing Ifrit at him (however, he still went through the reaction script upon his death).



At just over two and a half hours into the stream, I'd collected two Crystals' worth of Jobs and grabbed the Steamship, so I figured that was a fairly good stopping point.

Water Crystal Jobs overview:

Berserker
Usable by: Bartz, Galuf, Faris
Stats: 30/22/28/20
Level bonus: STR, STR, VIT - not implemented
Innate: Two-Handed
Default ability: !TwinCut
Abilities: !Fury, !TwinCut, Endure, Berserk, Two Handed; Berserkers can also equip !Drink
Dot-chan's Impressions: I was so looking forward to play with Berserker. Alas. :(

Time Mage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Faris
Stats: 22/27/21/27
Level bonus: STR, VIT, MAG
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Time
Abilities: Steady MP (some small amount of MP regen per turn), !Time, Brawl, Pierce, First Strike; Time Mages can also equip !Smoke and First Strike
Dot-chan's Impressions: I've got enough action economy, so I don't mind leaving Time Mage on the bench for now.

Summoner
Usable by: Lenna, Galuf
Stats: 20/20/27/29
Level bonus: VIT, MAG, MP
Level bonus: STR, VIT, MAG
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Summon
Abilities: MP + 30%, !Summon, !Gaia, Magic Amp, !Call; Summoners can also equip !Animals and Y-Magic ("Stronger single cast"; I haven't bothered to test how much of a boost this is but I had it on while I had a Summoner in the party)
Dot-chan's Impressions: So far, Summoner has been nerfed hardest by the MP mechanic, as they eventually need to spend every other turn using Brave or Defend just to be able to cast. With elemental field effect complicating things on top of that, I have no idea if I'll use Summoner again.

Red Mage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Faris
Stats: 26/25/21/26
Level Bonus: STR, MAG, MP
Level bonus: STR, VIT, MAG
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Red
Abilities: !Flirt, !Red, MP + 30%, Revenge, !X-Magic; Red Mages can also equip !Flirt without having learned it on level up and Steady MP.
Dot-chan's Impressions: Red Mages are definitely buffed compared to vanilla, but I'm not sure how it compares in the mod to the other classes. Either way, I definitely need to remember to leave room for at least one person to learn X-Magic.

Lord
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna
Stats: 27/23/26/24
Level Bonus: STR, HP, MP
Default ability: !Brave
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: So far I've been using this class as a substitute Freelancer, but I probably should gain levels in Jobs that give me skills before I come back into it.

Dark Knight
Usable by: Bartz, Faris, Galuf
Stats: 26/24/30/20
Level Bonus: Not yet implemented
Default ability: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: Bench.

Fire Crystal Jobs (1) overview:
Ninja
Usable by: Bartz, Faris, Galuf
Stats: 23/29/25/23
Level Bonus: STR, AGL, AGL - not implemented
Innate: Dual Wield
Default ability: Throw
Abilties: !Smoke, !Throw, !Image, First Strike, Dual-Wield; Ninjas can also equip !Hide
Dot-chan's Impressions: Ninjas can definitely hit like a truck...if I can keep them equipped with and using the right elemental weapons.

Tamer
Usable by: Bartz, Faris, Galuf
Stats: 27/23/28/22
Level Bonus: STR, VIT, HP
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Catch
Abilities: !Calm, !Catch, Mastery, !Control, !Animals; Tamers can also equip HP 30%
Dot-chan's Impressions: In vanilla I pretty much only used Tamers for !Control to trivialize certain encounters and to learn Blue Magic, so maybe this time around I can learn the secrets of throwing bears wild creatures at the problem.

Geomancer
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Galuf
Stats: 22/22/29/27
Level Bonus - VIT, VIT, MAG - not implemented
Innate: Pharmacology, Step Guard, Pitfalls
Default ability: !Gaia
Abilities: !Gaia, !GilToss, Y-Magic, Pharmacology; Geomancers can also equip !Gil Toss and Pharmacology
Dot-chan's Impressions: !Gaia's usefulness is still dependent on the RNG, plus each area favors certain elements, so I'm probably only going to use them to ignore pits and damage floors.

Vampire
Usable by: Faris, Galuf
Stats: 27/25/27/26
Level Bonus: STR, AGL, Mag
Innate: Undead status
Default ability: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: I would chance using this as the Freelancer equivalent for Faris and Galuf but I'd probably keep forgetting they are undead and accidentally damage them a billion times.

Sage
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna
Stats: 20/23/25/28
Level Bonus: AGL, MAG, MP
Innate: Undead status
Default ability: N/A
Abilities: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: I will probably never use this Job.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Apr 22, 2020

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:

Rabbi Raccoon posted:

This is reminding me of Final Fantasy VI: Brave New World, where you need to plan early on how you're gonna build your characters with very little room for straying, only with far more options.

The upside to Void Divergence is that it's not overtuned to assuming you will be min-maxed...heck, even on the highest difficulty, it didn't feel all that different from the vanilla experience in terms of numbers coming out of encounters (but then again I was just experimenting with regular encounters).

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Live on twitch for more Void Divergence.

dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:
Once again live on Twitch, hopefully this time I can get farther than I did last time.

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dotchan
Feb 28, 2008

I wanna get a Super Saiyan Mohawk when I grow up! :swoon:


Trying out Ranger and Bard will have to wait until I'm done getting Double Cast on the people who can use Red Mage.



I found Ramuh (6475 HP, weak to poison/cold) on my first encounter (wonder if I got lucky or it's guaranteed) and dealt with him in short order.



There's a weird graphical glitch in Bartz's house; leave it alone, as interacting with it borks the game.



One Black Chocobo world tour/shopping montage later, I'm ready to see what Sandworm has to offer.



Sandworm (21650 HP, no stated weaknesses but takes extra damage from lightning and water) is when Void Divergence takes the kid gloves off even for the lowest difficulty setting. In addition to his usual nonsense (which is why I didn't want to experiment with Aqua Rake), he can also throw Quake at the party and his holes will still randomly cast Demi for no apparent reason that I could figure out even in the replay.



So it was over to Istory forest to grind levels and eventually (after some more failed attempts at Sandworm) Dual Cast for at least Tiz before I throw myself at Sandworm again since Mini Dragons are no longer super-minions that guarantee a TPK unless you hit hard and fast.



I also discover that the Float I get from the Stealth ring can be passed onto all party members if I put it on them, engage in a random battle, and then end it by winning or running away. (And no, I couldn't have cast it as Time Mages; Float is either not yet available, or not available at all.)



With Float, the extra levels and Doublecast, I manage to overcome Sandworm, but even then I was spending a lot of turns where only Galuf was attacking and the other three were stuck in sandbag mode. Overcoming Sandworm (the failures, the grinding, plus the final successful attempt) took me a total of two hours.



I didn't have !Scan equipped when I engaged Cray Claw, but given that he's basically a Karlobos recolor, I breezed through him without issue.



Since I still needed to do some shopping, I also took the opportunity to learn all of the Blue Magic I cared to pick up (done off stream because I thought that too boring to watch/commentate over).



Adamantoise (948 HP, weak to poison/cold) was, by this point, nothing more than a speed bump.



Ditto the mini-bosses (3614 HP, weak to water/thunder; 3484 HP, weak to water/wind) guarding Flying Ronka Ruins; I didn't even need to drag out the battle to learn the Blue Magic they had (once I remembered to switch to Blue Mages).



Sol/Soul Cannon (45035 HP, weak to poison/thunder; the Launchers were 15332 HP each and weak to holy/flame), though tough (I ended the battle with only two units alive), had much of his toughness mitigated by Vampire, which is probably what the Mod was expecting me to have with Sandworm, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.



Archeoavis (each form having around 5300 HP and weak to wind/holy, flame/earth, water/wind, cold/poison, and flame/holy respectively) being one of the few bosses with rotating elemental weaknesses didn't have its script changed as far as I could tell (other than tagging each form's special ability with its associated element) and I didn't have much trouble with it.



Trying out the new jobs will be left for the next update.



(I did have Ranger in my party while grinding, and I kind of wish !Aim was the default ability since !Animals is usually something I only put on anybody when I need to heal; that Mysidian Rabbit was changed to the FF6 version (which gives a piddling amount of healing for the party) is of little comfort.)

Fire Jobs (2) Overview:

Ranger
Usable by: Bartz, Lenna, Faris
Stats: 27/28/23/22
Level Bonus: STR, AGL, VIT
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Animals
Abilties: !Aim, !Animals, !Calm, !Rose (no idea what that does yet), !RapidFire ; Rangers can also equip Caution (avoids back attacks) and Endure (Max HP +10% and "defy death", not sure what that means, though :iiam: )
Dot-chan's Impressions: Like I said, I would have rather had !Aim as the default ability, but otherwise Ranger is fine to sit in for this part of plot.

Bard
Usable by: Lenna, Galuf, Faris
Stats: 21/29/26/23
Level Bonus: AGL, AGL, VIT - not implemented
Innate: N/A
Default ability: !Sing
Abilties: !Hide, !Sing, !Animals,
Dot-chan's Impressions: It's Bard. I may learn !Hide for the lulz, but otherwise I don't mind having a dedicated Bard doing nothing but !Sing setups when necessary.

Oracle
Usable by: Galuf, Lenna
Stats: 23/18/26/30
Level Bonus: Not implemented
Innate: N/A
Default ability: N/A
Abilties: N/A
Dot-chan's Impressions: From the Job description, this looks like the GBA Oracle Job, which would at least be interesting to experiment with once it gets implemented but I otherwise would not have the patience to science out the timing necessary.

dotchan fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Apr 24, 2020

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