I've got a Job for you! - Let's Play Final Fantasy V!

I'll go ahead and add that part of FF6 was my fault. Back when we were play testing the translation, I was so horribly biased against any supporters of the Woolsey translation that I endlessly kept praising it just because it was different from his. As such, we released it as was, and THEN Sky had to re-translate nearly half the game because of inconsistency. We would have eventually wised up and redid FF6's writing, but shortly after that FF6A was announced, ChrisRPG died, and... yeah, we never quite got around to it, though it was fun when we eventually found out the translator of FF6A was aware of our translation and even...

...put in a reference to it.

I never did the extra stuff in this game. Now that I've read this LP, I'm glad I didn't. That looked needlessly difficult and tedious to get through.

Needlessly difficult? From what I've read, the only part of the extra dungeons that fit's that description is the Super Omegas/Shinryus part.

The whole thing does look kinda tedious though.

You've summed it up pretty well there. The actual bonus dungeon itself isn't really that hard; most fights you can cheese it with !Rapid Fire and !Summon. But you get into literally hundreds of battles over the course of completing the bonus dungeon thanks to its size and batshit encounter rate.

The reasons why Neo Shinryu and Omega Mk.II are difficult are the same reasons why Hell Wyrm and Yiazmat in FF12 are hard: they have way too much much HP, they hit too damn hard, and they're way too fast. It's not so much "challenging" as it is ridiculously stacked against you to the point that it becomes a luck-based mission if your level isn't near 99. In fact, the only reason why FF5A's uber bosses aren't as bad as those aforementioned FF12 hellspawn is because they don't have over a million HP each like said FF12 hellspawn do.

I beat the Hell Wyrm! It took me an hour. I consider myself exempt from fighting any other optional superbosses that aren't any fun.

Definitely steer clear of Yiazmat, then. He's got 6 TIMES as much HP as Hell Wyrm, and the battle can't be left on auto. It's a tedious 2- to 8-hour slog where you can't do anything else for the duration. And somehow Squenix thought this translated out to "fun".

The Gilgamesh fights in FF12 are far more interesting than either of the super-wyrms, if you ask me. And I'm not just saying that 'cause the music's awesome, either.

Clearly, someone there must have went bat-shit insane during the merger.

Personally, I blame MMOs.

The apologist in me wants to say that Square-Enix looked at other MMOs, saw that they have bosses with ridiculous amounts of HP, and felt their MMO-like game needed one too.

They didn't even have to look at other MMOs, they just had to look at their own MMO, where Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden sit with staggeringly large HP totals (though admittedly not as high as Yiazmat's). Actually, XII took a lot more from XI than those who dislike the first MMO entry care to admit, such as elementals, the loss of random encounters, the larger, more open landscapes, and so on.

FF12 does a credible job of translating the MMO experience to single-player, yes. Unfortunately, the developers forgot at some point that 3-man parties do not have the same sort of prowess as the kind of huge groups you can assemble in an MMO. A boss with 50 million HP is thrilling when you're tackling him with two dozen people. It's an irritating and long-term hassle when you've only got a quarter-dozen people and all of them are controlled by you and the computer in turn.

Quite frankly, if not for the RNG manipulation trick that lets you always get rare items from chests, I'd probably never play FF12 again. It's just so amazingly tedious and often grossly out of the player's favor otherwise.

To be fair, Yiazmat doesn't recover HP if you leave the area, so you could fight and kill it over weeks or possibly months of time, if need be.

To be not so fair, this is only true if you can leave the area before Yiazmat casts Regen on itself, which is not always possible.

I totally did!

Awesome LPs - brings back many fond memories.

Appendix A - A Guide to Movers

Movers are easily the most valuable encounter in Final Fantasy V, giving 199 ABP and 100,000 Gil each time you defeat a batch of them. But they're also a rare encounter. Fortunately, players of the GBA version can mitigate this problem!



By quicksaving on the Last Floor of the Interdimensional Rift (conveniently the very room with the last save point), you can force the encounter table to re-roll entirely to a pre-determined set of battles. The end result of this is that the second fight you'll be up against upon reloading will be against Movers every single time!



Another useful (and not-well-known) trick is to use Requiem on them. As it turns out, Movers are technically undead, meaning Requiem technically wrecks their day. Racking up the 12,000 damage necessary to kill them before they get a turn is dead simple with all four allies singing Requiem!

This has been a Final Fantasy V !Science! update.

So what I'm getting out of this is that whenever I play through FF5 again, I should ignore everything FF4 ever taught me about Bards and actually use them this time.

I dunno, it's sounding like their good songs are pretty backloaded.

Nah, you can get Romeo's Ballad in World 1 and Requiem and Swift Song almost as soon as World 2 begins. Those songs are amazing and can definitely hold you over until you get Hero's Rime.

Bards are situationally useful, as most classes are. With the right conditions, they shine. With the wrong conditions, they're a liability. In most conditions, they're at least somewhat useful.

Bards are excellent for long battles or battles against the dead/dragons. They're not so hot anywhere else.

Amusingly I found out about this while browsing the Gamefaqs forums in a fit of annoyance over Movers auto-ending the battle. Of course I also forgot that I had two pairs of Hermes Sandles to speed up my turns so they wouldn't do that. Oh well, my air-headedness brought this to everyone's attention anyway.

Edward is totally amazing in FFIVA (which may not mean much if you haven't played the game, just saying).

I knew that. It's just hard to unlearn.