FF6 - Cactaur get. I'm not entirely sure how you're supposed to get around the death counter; Reraise doesn't guarantee success, and you can't Libra to check Gigantaur's HP so it's hard to line up something like Jump to make sure one person lives. Perhaps coming in with someone having Birdicite equipped and having everyone jump when he's at low health, and hoping for the best? Ah well, in any case I won so whatever.
I decide that I'm not gonna bother getting more powerful equipment before the final dungeon, it should be easy enough as is. I probably will before the Dragon's Den, though (if I even play that, I'm starting to get pretty tired of the game). Anyway, onto Kefka's Tower.
I split my main party into two with scrubs and have my semicompetents form a party by themselves. I realize my semicompetents don't have anyone who can cast Ultima, but that is completely unnecessary, and besides Magic Urn Gau is on that team so whatever. I look up what parties have the earliest opportunities to off the last dragon bosses and start with Party 2. Holy shit Gogo's stats suck. I knew this from old DL arguments, but this is the first time I've played that I bothered to check. Goddamn how terrible. Good thing being a heal battery / Tools / Blitz doesn't really need good stats but jeeze.
Gold Dragon goes down to 2 quick + Ultima rounds. Silly.
And then out of nowhere, I almost get wiped out by 2 Ninjas + Caster, didn't catch their names, since they countered everything. Whoadang. Tricky.
Switch to party three (Celes/Strago/Locke/Mog), no problems, destroy skull dragon. Get Crusader. Not to complain about being overpowered, but really since you can't get it until about halfway through the game's last dungeon, this really should have been the magicite to teach Ultima. Like, then you'd actually have to think about which spells to cast to maximize damage up until this point. On that note, I have had the Cursed Shield equipped since I got the bloody thing, and always had someone in my active party using it. Jesus what a stupid secret. You must really have to grind to get this thing, and by that time you've probably already got Aegis/Gengi/Elemental Shields and Ragnarok. I guess you could have taken the Sword like a dumbass instead, so this would be your only way to Unlock Ultima afterwards? But jeeze at that point you may as well just restart the game. It'll probably take you less time. Stupid stupid dumb.
Back to Party 1 (Edgar/Sabin/Shadow/Gau). I find out the Minerva isn't effected by the Merit Award, and my new dream of Sexy Edgar is dashed before I even knew I had it.
Things go relatively smoothly. Gau aside, they're all characters who are fine right out of the box, and Gau only needs a little bit of knowledge about which Rages to get. Nobody has Ultima so I throw Crusader on to get Meteor. Things go smoothly until L5 Death wipes out my whole party in one go. -_- Great. Retry with some Safety Bits/Memento Rings and yeah. Fortunately, this game has good save point placement and (especially with frameskip) I'm back to where I was in only 5 minutes or so.
Fighting with this party is actually pretty interesting, since I have to rely heavily on status to get anything done. I probably said it before, but for some reason I was under the impression that status sucked in this game when I was a kid; it definitely does not. Berserk, Confuse, Stop, and ID in particular all have been consistently useful throughout the game, until the point where it was just easier to blow things up and frameskip.
Beat Demon, meh not hard. Beat Fiend, was a bit more challenging since it was my Shadow/Edgar team. On this fight, though, I finally get the Paladin's Shield, so yay? Whatever. So without grinding, you basically have to have the thing on from as soon as you can get it until the end of the game. Dumb.
So, Kefka. 62000 HP. That's a little over 6 castings of Ultima. I wanna try something. I throw on a Soul of Thamasa and Gold Hairpin on Terra, then Who Gives a Shit. Unfortunately, I couldn't kill him before he got a turn because Dualcast takes forever. However, Terra did get off 5 ultimas in one turn for all intents and purposes, and that was neat. Celes had to pick up the slack and cast it twice more.
Ending was the ending.
So yeah that definitely scratched a nostalgia itch. While I enjoyed it a lot now, I have the feeling that if it was my first time playing the game I'd have a much less high opinion of it. Lots of parts have not aged very well. For one, the character writing is a lot weaker than I recalled. Two, the dungeon design is really shitty in the last half of the game, and this shittiness shines through in Ebot's Rock, Odin's Castle, and the Fanatic's Tower. The last dungeon is fine, actually, but there's a lot of dungeons that are just a chore to explore. The cave to Odin's Castle in particular had an obnoxious combination of low view distance, sprites overlaid on places you can walk that make it look like there are walls where there aren't any, and overall labyrinthine feel to it.
The combat is actually pretty enjoyable if you take away Ultima, though there is definitely something to be said for being able to stamp everything under your boot with little to no effort. While having such a large cast was interesting for character work, as far as combat goes I can't say I'm terribly fond of the FF6-7-8-12 Philosophy of "every character can access every skill at once." Class systems are just way more interesting, and I am not terribly surprised that interest in FF5 is surging again with the Fiesta challenges. It could be interesting to split the magicite evenly across the cast -Umaro and allow each one to only be used once and see what sort of "classes" get built that way, but honestly that still sounds not very fun.
Though, there's one area it still shines just as much as it did back during the SNES days - Graphics and Sound. The OST is just really enjoyable to listen to, and there's a reason FF:RK sprites are all in the style of FF6 instead of adapting from FF4 or 5.
Still one of my favorite games due to nostalgia, but there's no way I'd enjoy it as much without that. It's just aged too poorly. Probably won't do the aftergame after all. Going through the new dungeon just brings up feelings of apathy and honestly I got other things I should be doing with my time and other games I could be playing.
