It's like chocolate in my peanut butter. Let's Play Final Fantasy V: The Ancient Cave

I thought the run setting just changed your "times ran" counter, for the sake of the run-count dependent weapons?

The jar does do that, but the guy in the upper right is supposed to toggle random run failure on/off.

Also I went ahead and fixed the problems I could find and put together a new version of the patch for the next run of the LP. Just use the barrel to rename the characters in your existing save and resave outside if you want to keep your records, TK.

Thank you Spoony! I will do the next run with that patch.

So, in order to get the records saved, you rename your guy, then head back outside and save over the file that comes with the game, and then go on as normal? I've never noticed the record-keeping barrel.

Unfortunately, Chemist was on my long list of neglected jobs and nobody had Mix.

That should do it! The barrel renames the character that's in the lead, so just switch people around until everyone has a proper name. The letters are scattered kind of haphazardly around both the hiragana and katakana pages, so it might take a little time to find what you're looking for, but the full upper and lowercase alphabets are there. The various custom item icons I couldn't use are also on the character list, so you can also name someone ShurikenWizardhatGauntlet if you really want to.

The record barrel is the one on the far left, but only if you examine it from below. The far right one does something when examined from below as well.

This is because you thought about the foyer of the Ancient Cave too linearly. Specifically, you worked on the long-held assumption that you'll get the same response checking a barrel/pot/chest/whatever from any direction.

Well, yes. That would make sense for a barrel.

If we're talking, say, a sandwich board, that would be different.

I request the second run include a tour of the pub again. I am so not clear on what all the options are. I always just delevel, grab the chests, and go.

Zazaza noooooooooooooo

Yes, please!

No problem, we'll take another look at that stuff next time.

Or it could also be because he skipped over reading that part in the readme.txt that came with the hack.

How are we going to ever learn from our mistakes if we don’ t take time to reflect? Now, opinions may vary on what mistakes were made during Zazaza’s misadventures, but here's what stands out in my mind.

Mistake #1: The Freebies that Got Away

It’s already been requested that we take a closer look at the pub next time we hit the Cave. There’s a good reason for that and here it is – we left the two free chests behind. What you’re supposed to do is loot them after you reset your levels and hope for the best.

Mistake #2:The AP That Got Away

The simple fact of the matter is, the enemies on these lower floors are so weak, we could take them with just about any party of weaklings. We even got a couple of high-rollers like Dancer and Berserker and let them go to waste sitting there. On the one hand, we learned that it is important to keep your Freelancers around to use the best weapons you find, but on the other hand you aren’t going to need all four of your characters as Freelancers.

This is still true. When you roll crap jobs for the first few floors, be careful about switching your characters and don’t switch them all at once.

Mistake #3: Getting Greedy

Treasure hunting on those early floors is just so dang fun and profitable that sometimes you can get carried away. We rushed through the first 20 floors without planning or taking our time to figure out some job paths, and we ended up with 20 floors of missed AP. Granted, the early floors don’t give as much AP as the later ones, but then you run into…

Mistake #5: The Wrong Jobs at the Wrong Time

We should have been taking advantage of these jobs as soon as we picked them up. But instead I made

Mistake #6: Holding Out For The One
And
Mistake #7: Running With an Unbalanced Team

While there are certain skills and items you probably won’t be able to make it to the boss without, you still have to make the best use of what you find, when you find it. That’s instead of shooting for what seemed to work well on a previous run.

Also, there was no reason whatsoever for all four characters to learn Lance. Had I diversified this lineup, I would have made much smoother progress on the later floors. To be honest, I’m kind of surprised that Team Zazaza made it as far down as they did, but that would be attributed to a few lucky misses in crucial spots, good luck with trapped chest, and more good luck avoiding the wrong bosses on boss floors. The difficulty spikes wildly at certain points and if you can squeak by, you can get pretty far.

Who knows, maybe had I not run into this guy I could have made it another 15 floors with these jokers?

I think you are missing one there chief.

4 is a secret mistake!

We don't talk about Mistake #4.

Mistake #4 is talking about Mistake #4. Thus we keep committing that mistake by referring to it. This is what happens when you let Tautology Club decide one of the mistakes.

I got the impression that early on you didn't grind the full five minutes per floor. There's another mistake. Perhaps you just didn't screenshots past the 9 minute mark.

My only thought is to entertain you.

I thought it was eight or nine minutes?

You only add five minutes to the timer for clearing a floor, thus clearing a floor within four or five minutes is an optimal use of your time.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense! (I have still not played this game)

You get +5 minutes when you go to the next floor, maxing out at 10:00. So if you always use 5 minutes you're getting the most out of your time. Boss floors reset the timer, so if you can remember when they're coming up you grind about 9 minutes before proceeding.

There are no screenshots of the later minutes because I am generally out of treasure chests to show you. I did as much grinding as usual and when my party wiped they were level-appropriate to the floor.

I forgot to ever get back to that Fairy Bow, didn't I? Sucker was doing nearly 2k damage when I got it, but I never used a Ranger this run.

Honestly, I don't think the full five minute grind per floor matters early. Yeah, with decent armor you'll have freelancers who can only be hurt by critical until floor 11 or so and with decent weapons you'll be one-shotting everything. But it's tedious and the way XP scales it's not that big a difference in the end.

Extra grinding on floor 1-22 is going to be worth about a floor worth of XP in the 50s and a single encounter before the end. There are some strange outliers: the third tier of monsters have some formations that give really good AP, like 5-9 each fight which is better than nearly anything else before 55 or so, so if you have good jobs very early it's worth getting extra AP there. But going for all the XP/GP on the early floors is only necessary if you want to optimize as much as you can and eek out every advantage. Not actually necessary as far as I can tell.

I got an Icebrand drop this run from a random encounter on what, the first floor? On my test run, I picked up Dragoon on floor 2 and had Lance by floor 20. What is that, 200 AP? That could just as easily have been Dance or Mix instead.

Don't count early-floor grinding out. Those APs are important. That is, if you have the right jobs. The biggest flaw of this hack is that you need a few lucky breaks to even have a shot at winning, no matter how well you plan.

Yeah, on my last run I had Samurai mastered with two characters somewhere in the mid 30s, so there's potentially a lot of AP to be gotten early on. I was wiping out groups with Slash before world 2 enemies even showed up.

FF5 vets know that there is no such thing as an unworkable combo of Jobs and/or equipment. It's hard to argue that you can ever truly be screwed when someone did a solo Freelancer run of this game.

...that involved breaking enormous amounts of rods. Not a tenable strategy here.

I assume you're referring to Sulla's "Batman" run, yes?

He didn't have a ten-minute time limit per dungeon floor. Opening up the menu and digging through your items every single fight would eat up massive amounts of your time.

Which answer's Mogri's question. You can do it without breaking lots of rods.

I would argue that FFV AC does in fact have unworkable parties, but solo freelancer might not be one of them.

This is slightly late and a bit off-topic, but I notice a few people mentioned getting this running on their PSP. I have yet to find any SNES emulator for PSP that was both stable and fast. What would you recommend for running this game on one?