Yep!!
The superbosses are down and I couldn’t have done it without drinking a bunch of godlike cocktails
The difficulty really ramps up in the final dungeon, but by that point I had 30 elixirs and I could spam either Meteor or Quick + Meteor + Meteor in every battle. It got me wondering how worse teams are supposed to go through all of that with only 99 hi-potions and a few Elixirs though. Not my problem though, I beat the fiesta!! Good luck to anyone else still going through it!
I really slowed down, I’m chilling toward the end of world 2. my dancer keeps dying to random attacks because this class sucks
i got started over the weekend, four black mages seems viable so far. i’m almost at the water crystal, which is as far as i’ve ever gotten
well, I did just pull out an interesting fight against the goo crystal things in the forest right before exdeath’s castle. I kept getting unlucky, they’d all just spam their ___ga spells on me over and over, I had no way to deal with that. just instant wipes. then one attempt my beastmaster hit the fire crystal with the release I’d stored for this fight, thanks to guide cheating, which almost killed it. then my team wiped, except blue mage lenna, who has my highest magic defense by far.
from this point the fight swapped into a rhythm where I eventually figured out that bringing one of the crystals down to presumably half health would trigger the ga spam, while the crystals that were healthy would only use standard physical attacks. now, I don’t think this is actually how the fight works, it appears to simply have chosen that pattern at that point. maybe it was a bug, maybe the fight has a few different patterns that can be triggered randomly or by different conditions, who knows. but the fire crystal was low, and lenna had a flame shield equipped, which meant it healed her to full with firaga every turn, without fail. so she happened to be immortal as long as I only had one other crystal below half health at any time. so I sat there slowly soloing the fight with lenna. they each got two turns between each of hers, so with four crystals it was fucking eight turns to one. I just burned through ethers using flame thrower on all of them until only the fire crystal was still alive, then I danced him to death with the dancing dagger. that’s final fantasy v gaming, baby.
It’s more doable than you’d think! While not all team combos can beat every one of the big bosses–in part because Omega and Shinryu require very different tactics–you can do fairly well even with seemingly suboptimal teams. Case in point:
Under normal circumstances, a Bard/Dancer/Thief/Ranger party would die very badly under Omega’s onslaught. However, because Omega is weak to Stop, having two party members spam Romeo’s Ballad means he can’t do shit while the other two party members use Sword Dance to bypass his defense and evasion.
Magic Lamp: A reusable item that cycles through the game’s summons from strongest to weakest before needing a recharge, it makes Necrophobe a lot easier and also kills one of NeoExDeath’s parts for free.
Hero’s Rime: A bard song that increases party levels while being sung. Can make the Samurai’s gil toss do 7000 HP to all enemies per turn.
Hermes Sandals: Perma-Hasters the wearer. In weaker teams, it means you a downed party member will have one turn to do a thing before being killed again, which is sometimes enough.
Wonder Wand: Cycles through all black and white spells, meaning, crucially, that it can be made to Berserk Shinryu, a key element in various strategies.
Reflect Zombie: By having someone use the bard’s Hide ability to avoid damage while other zombified party members equipped with Reflect Rings bounce back enemy magic attacks, you can defeat certain bosses with little trouble.
Bachi and Miffy are streaming their Fiestas:
https://www.twitch.tv/bachelorsoft
I’m still in the ship graveyard because I underestimated my ability to play videogames while I was on vacation. Turns out I like drinking beers while sitting in the lake better. I’m going to finish it though, just you watch.
@daphaknee how did your run go?
I made it to the first crystal and I have a bunch of knights and then got distracted. charging ds now tho
I’m about to go on vacation myself (real one this time). I thought about loading the rom on my 3DS but I’m already working through Final Fantasy Legend II!
Butz will have to wait.
Neo Exdeath was way more painless than I thought I’d be. Even then, it was a close thing, basically being down to who managed to do a finishing blow first.
This was, I think, the first time I beat the game with only one character remaining, and it was kinda disappointing. One of the things I really like about FFV is how, in the ending only the characters who survive the final battle make it back (for a little while, at least) , which is something I kinda wish had been incorporated more into other games. Unfortunately, the writers didn’t quite take into account only having one character left, and so what works when there are multiple survivors doesn’t quite work when there’s only one.
The difficulty curve of this run was WILD. Team Freelancer (beginning to black chocobo) was a cakewalk. Team Bard (black chocobo to Earth Crystal) was absolute hell on Earth. Team Dancer worked really well with Bard, and I remain convinced that Dancer is the most underrated job in the game. Team Thief was a snoozer, offering nothing and just being less effective in every way, but not enough to add any real difficulty. Finally, Team Go Go Four Job Rangers was more useful than I’d initially given it credit for: 1) I could use !Mug, which actually saved the Thief job from being a complete waste. 2) !Rapid Fire allowed me to do damage comparable to Sword Dance, and was unreliable in more useful ways. Only one boss gave me any real trouble in the end game, and largely because beating him required me to do heavy backtracking afterwards. The outfits are also…not great.
ETA: Playing in Japanese was fine! Turns out having a beginner’s understanding of the language/knowing the English script by heart makes following along surprisingly easy! It also made me reevaluate the GBA English translation, which, as it turns out, is more faithful to the original than I’d believed.
Did you learn any fun words?
@HOBO and i are streaming our fiestas again soon on his twitch !! come watch bachelor suffer kupo i’m doing fine so far kupo
edit okay we are live kupo 
Unfortunately, I think the answer is closest to “no.” The best I can say is that there were some kanji combinations I could eventually begin to recognize–like the ones for “meteor” and “seal”, and may subsequently recognize in the wild, but that’s never really been helpful for long-term learning. I’d have needed to at least keep a notebook to write down stray kanji, but playing the game really disincentivizes it, unless I had decided to limit myself to like two words per session–which come to think of it is not a terrible idea.
One thing I did realize, though, is that Hiryu, the name given to Lenna’s emotional support beast in the English translation (which is given the species name “wind drake” to distinguish it from other dragons), isn’t actually meant to be a proper name in the original, and is actually just the species name, (飛竜)–flying dragon. In this sense, the translation improves on the original in an important way, and I only wish they’d also given Krile’s emotional support beast a name, since it’s kinda the odd one out.
By the way, in contemporary Japanese fantasy, 竜 is typically used for European-style dragons, whereas 龍 is used for Chinese-style dragons.
I think all of the dragons in FF5 are referred to with 竜, even Shinryū (who is sort of a hybrid of the two dragon styles). Whereas Zelda BotW’s long, flowing dragons are pronounced “doragon” but written as 龍.
I was wondering what the difference was! That’s really cool!
slowly back on this, we’re on the third world now. second world boss was relatively painless, even though our dancer did the confuse tango five straight turns. god I hate this job. the dungeon, however, was pretty painful, especially without access to float for the lava portions. random encounters like double yellow dragon while sitting in lava, no thanks. I cheated at one point with the pixel remaster’s ability to turn off random encounters. I admit it. I’m a fraud. I’m not a gamer.
Japanese is such an unserious language this is ridiculous
