By popular demand (mostly just the population that should be more distracted by blue-eyed blondes) my chronicles return. Doesn't hurt that the last battle in the string to report on is kinda amusing. Anyways, less rambling and more reporting.
So, when last I left off, it was four sessions ago and we were working our way through Goug's Colliary. We had gotten to the final battle, and had taken a peak at it before we started, so we knew this battle was going to be a Kleptomaniac's wet dream. And FFT makes kleptos of us all.
So, let's go with the initial setup. It's kinda important, and the changes will be fun to watch.
Cyril - Bard w/ Steal, Equip Shield, Abandon, Move +2. Decked out for speed and Mag.
Shaker - Knight w/ Steal and Excalibur/Materia Blade
Fargus - Chemist w/ Charge, Judo Outfit and Jade Armlet
Jasmin - Samurai w/ Summon and Muramasa
Beowulf - Best Fit and Yin Yang
Generally speaking, we're all in regular form with a few exceptions. Notable is the fact that Cyril there is sporting a 500 damage Quick Attack with minimal twinkage. So we look at the battle. The lancers are definatly scary, but the Apanda is just an Apanda, and it has two dancers. From the previous fight we all smirk at each other and know how that goes. As one of the Dancers starts twirling her nameless dance, we note that it's supposed to go off after her next turn and write the battle off as a slaughter. While it turns out that we were wrong, the battle does it's level best to confirm that impression as Cyril and his mediocre HP gets killed before he can actually do anything thanks to the lancers. Then the dancer skips her turn and the following nameless song ripples through the party, leaving Fargus as a frog. But, no fear! He'll simply cur... wait, Frog disables Item? And no one else has status healing, or resurrection? And so, with Ramza on a timer, and our sole source of healing down, we quickly fall.
Take 2
Cyril - Squire with Negotiate
No other changes of note.
So, we try again, this time with a second status healer and reviver. Jasmin continues to bring the secondary HP healing. This time things open with a Confuse 2 dropped on us all right our of the gate, and we're lucky as it only hits Cyril and Beowulf. And Cyril wastes his confused turns threatening Beowulf before using Heal on him, curing him of confusion. As for the rest, things are a little more dire. Shaker is suitably invincible, but Fargus is not, and Jasmin is a beloved target of Jump attacks. Nameless dance also kicks in, helping to keep Cyril out of the fight after he gets unconfused. And with Cyril out of the fight most of the time, this leaves us with only Fargus who, despite Auto-Potion, eventually falls. And we're left unable to revive him in time. This also marks the first time Beowulf has the bright idea of attempting to Berserk Jasmin. We'll get back to that later.
Take 3
Cyril - Squire w/ Negotiate and Excalibur
Shaker - Thief w/ Item, Equip Sword, Materia Blade and Ice Brand.
This battle has one notable thing for it's beginning. Thanks to a slight glitch in AI, and our party being in a different formation than usual, the Invisible Jasmin manages to keep the enemy from actually attempting to attack us before our turn. This leads to us getting a Kiyomori up while still unmolested. Then the battle begins in earnest, with Cyril attempting to get up the stairs while the real fight began. Beowulf, with no sword and no Magic had nothing to do but cower in the corner. And so we begin to struggle with the three Lancers, trying to work our way over to Reis without killing them. This time we're actually holding our own, and get into a holding pattern despite one lucky Nameless Dance hitting Cyril and Jasmin with sleep. (At this point in time, they were next to each other, Cyril was about to get a turn, and Beowulf, in his corner, was right next to a Kiyomori'd Cyril with a turn, able to punch him back to alertness. He double waited.) Another fun point of this battle was where a lethal jump was aimed at Jasmin, and Cyril got a turn, allowing him to chuck a rock at Jasmin, shoving her over a square and saving her, only for a second Jump to be aimed right away, and for Cyril to get a second turn before either Jasmin moved or the second jump resolved and killed her, leading to a second rock saving her, again. Alas, for all our efforts, the fact that we had to spend so much time playing defensively meant that we were unable to get to Reis in time. In particular, she breathed on the Apanda, giving him a lethal Lifebreak. And so, despite our efforts, we lost.
Take 4
Cyril - Mediator w/ Math Skill
Fargus - Knight w/ Item and Excalibur
Jasmin - Samurai w/ White Magic
At this point, a sane group would likely forget about the stealing, and just work on winning. Then again, a sane group wouldn't play a four man challenge where one randomly picked person would try to kill the party. So we step up and try again. This time we have a few things going for us. First, everyone has healing and some form of revival. Second, our primary healer is hasted and insanely durable. Third, and most important, we finally realized the real implications of all our enemie's being mini-bosses was, namely, they wouldn't crystalize. This meant we could safely kill them and then bring them back when we wanted to in order to take their stuff.
The battle started in a pretty specatcular way. Not quite the 'no one attacks' of the previous try, but Shaker instead, on a turn with nothing better to do, breaks through the Blade Grasp on the hasted lancer, and nabs her Setimieson first try. With no other real reason to keep her alive, we then smack her down with great justice and move on. Fargus still spends all of his turns on items, with the other two lancers keeping us busy, and one of the dancers always keeping a steady stream of Nameless Dance up meaning that we'd always have some problem needing dealing with. But with two item slingers and an Esuna caster this was less of an issue than before. This time we made our way through and Shaker killed one of the two dancers, though it quickly became apparent that the other one was too evasive to be dealt with through our usual means (ie, Shaker) and he had issues with the Ice Absorption anyways. So, her dance could only be dealt with by two people. Cyril, who was way too busy keeping up a Reraise/Cure 2/Haste/de-Confuzzling spam, and Jasmin, who by this time had been hit with Berserk by Beowulf, and was merrily trying to catch up to one of the Lancers that was leading her on a merry chase on the other side of the map. After a while, the trio of usefulness manage to steal the Genji equips and take out the Limit Lancer, then lure the other Lancer over in order to steal her shield, de-berserk Jasmin, and then kill her. The team was successful in all but one of these endeavours. Which led to the Lancer Teleport 2ing away and dropping Galaxy Stop on us. Well, no big deal, it shouldn't hit all of us. Except it does. So we wait for it to wear off, except she just keeps spamming it. And it hits us all, again. And again. Three times it lands on the entire party. During this time Fargus gets killed, comes back, and takes a swing at the Lancer, but thanks to bad compatability, Defense UP, and the Salty Rage, he is unable to accomplish anything and then when she ports away, he again gets caught in the lockdown. Everyone else just gets stoned. And so a successful run gets killed by obscene luck with Galaxy Stop. And it's here where we end the session thanks to massive disappointment.
Take 5
Jasmin - White Mage w/ Summon
Assorted small skillset changes (most notably, Shaker learning Maiden's Kiss) completely forgotten this time.
Another week, another try. The one big change here is Jasmin. Her skillset is the same, but her class is different. Mostly due to the argument about Beowulf's Yin Yang magic, which had arguably cost us the victory the week before thanks to rendering Jasmin utterly useless and dragging her to a part of the field where she would remain useless, and keeping her from killing the Nameless Dancer. Argument went kind of like so.
R: alright, and now to put Yin Yang on Beowulf.
T: No, let's not do that.
R: Why not? He'll be useless without it.
T: Sure, but he's a liability with it.
D: But he has Sleep, Confusion and Berserk learned. We want him to use those.
T: But he never does. He's more likely to berserk Jasmin, and that kills all the things that make her effective.
D: Well, sure. But that's just because she has Two Hands and a good weapon. The AI thinks it'll be really good. So if we make her attack suck, then that'll fix that problem.
R: Well, how about I just go Cleric.
D: Yeah, that'd fix the problem.
T: Right then, objection withdrawn.
And it worked, too. One of Beo's early actions was to drop a Sleep on the Hasted Lancer, taking her out of the fight for quite a while, and shocking us with his first wholly useful action since the first run. Then he dropped a Berserk on that same Lancer, which was less awesome, but whatever. And so we marched on. With one of the Lancers out of the way, things got a lot easier, especially since we now had a lot more protection against the Lancer's attacks in the form of effective Evasion, Resistance, and Absorption. We even managed to early on steal the Limit Lancer's weapon, feeling certain it would mean her cirppling while Cyril was notably effective with spammed Slows, Hastes, and Reraises to keep control firmly in our hands, especially with the undying Fargus around to revive and heal. Even the dances weren't so bad as Reis took down one Dancer by herself, and when the Apanda was starting to get threatening, we were able to quickly swoop in and off it. The worst thing that happened was that Jasmin had a nasty tendency of spending time as a Toad thanks to two hits from Nameless Dance and an Early Frog 2. During all of this, Then came the Galaxy Stop spam.
This time it was only 70% accuracy, with a tendancy to miss Fargus and hit Shaker. Leaving us with almost no capacity to actually do anything. But we had a good feeling, and soon enough Cyril managed to get close enough to the Starry Lancer, with whom he had good compatability. And so he moved up and opened negotiations. And got shut down hard before getting stopped. Our one chance had failed, and again only Fargus could move. We were desperate, and so, we found a new way to get Cyril where he needed to go. Namely, he had at his command a Reraise he could spam at will, as well as Negotiate, which would allow for the looting of the Venetian Shield. And so, it became the duty of whoever could still move to kill Cyril, that he could rise again and make his movement only to be stopped and killed again, repeating the gruesome cycle of progress. With Fargus' tough love, Cyril reached the Starry Lancer again, and he opened negotiations with faith. And he did it! Then as negotiations continued, Shaker nabbed what he wanted, then we ressed the Genji Lancer and offed the dangerous one. The Genji Lancer, despite still having her awesome Limits even after we took her weapon, proved no match for four of us, and we quickly took her stuff, and called it a day.
In the end, we left that battle with a Holy Lance, Setiemison, Venitian Shield, an Angel Ring, and the Genji Shield, Helm, and Armour. This is the Way!
This is also the end of that session. Well, I suppose there was a random battle, but it was a proper steamrolling. Same with the random at Finath to start the next session. So let's start with Germinas Peak instead.
Seems that not only were we faced with a dirty bunch of thieves, but they were allied with a vile chemist as well, who sought to break the chains of the earth and fly. On the other hand, we're now in a training setup, with Calc Cyril, Dancing Jasmin, Lancer Shaker, and Thief Fargus. Things open up badly for the poor thieves as Fargus kills their leader in one hit. A Chemist brings him back, but Jasmin starts up Wiznaibus to laugh at their puny Phoenix Downs even while Cyril calculated their leader's doom. A Nameless Dance goes off, but most of the foes only get Shell, which is useless to them here, with one exception, the Vile Chemist got Protect. This means that Shaker's attempt at him was therefore laughably pathetic. What was less laughably pathetic was Cyril warping to the top of the hill, nabbing a nifty new mantle, and then writing the pharmacy technician's name into a notebook. Some rumours state that he did so in an overly dramatic fashion whilst his eyes glowed red and he ate potatoe chips, but we all know those as the Church's lies. Meanwhile, Fargus and his knives had fun, whittling down the enemies. Truly, it got so bad for the poor sods that their best option to accomplish anything saw them trying to attack a thief with auto-potion through front evade. The battle ended with that poor sod getting pushed off a cliff as Shaker finally reached the battle.
Poeskas Lake also ended poorly. Something about Math Skill lending itself very well to undead battles what with the Cure 2 being awesome thing and all. Also useful was Shaker and his Holy Lance and Fargus of his twin Air Knives of killing things dead. Jasmin managed to score a few kills with her Wiznaibus before simply going off to boost her brave.
And now for Elmdor. The gates proved mildly tricky as we intended to learn Ultima here. Unfortunatly, attempt #1 saw Ramza get Charmed, followed by half the demons and both the Assassins getting hasted. We still almost won until we discovered that even if they're ubersquires, the mechanics of Ultima are simply beyond frogs. Attempt #2 saw Ramza go in hatless, and it worked like a charm with him getting appropriately nuked. Jasmin then tried out her Charge +7 Katana swing, neatly decapitating an assassin.
As for the Elmdor Battle... we went in with a setup fairly similar to what we had for Goland 5. Fargus was a Chemist, Shaker was a Knight with Excal, Jasmin was a Samurai with Heal. Cyril, was basically exactly the same. Battle started off well with us fending off the combined assault. However, it quickly became apparent that Elmdor knew our plan, and he had a simple counter measure of his own. Death before dishonour, or disrobing. And so we barely saw any Draw Outs, as Elmdor did his level best to kill himself, and almost succeeded. Indeed, for several rounds he ignored Shaker's merry slaughtering on his support as he blood sucked Cyril, the guy with the Slow Spell. If he hadn't of stopped, odds are pretty good he would have "won". But he eventually didn't renew Cyril's zombie vamp status even as Celia was critted and ran away and Lede was counting down to oblivion. And here is where things get fun, as we break his speed, and buff our own. At one point before things were totally under control, Lede turned into a crystal, and we wanted Elmdor to grab it. He refused. We even had to kill Celia twice to give him more chances, but he would not be baited. So we simply had him broken down to 0 Speed (w/ Slow) and I think Shaker was around 25 Speed by the time we were done (he was definatly getting every other action by the end, and then killed him pretty quick.
So, it was pretty dang easy outside of the early threat that our quarry would kill itself. And there is where we stop. Zalera shall wait for next time.
