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

So why are Butts and Faris Freelancers instead of Mimes?

Somebody said Mimes don't have as much variety of equipment, so I assume it's to use all the heavy armor and swords.

Yeah, mimes are limited to mage weapons (rods, staves, knives) so freelancer is necessary to use those.

Mimes also don't have Fight or Item, both useful commands for a beatstick.

.....I'm gone for half a year, and suddenly amazing LP's of hacks I've never heard of show up?!!? jafdlbnfoadpfnoefnnajfojfnao!!!...That felt good. Anyway, enjoy destroying old men! I'll go play Final Fantasy Dimensions.

Hmm... shouldn't either Lenna or Krile be carrying !Time? At least one member on your team doesn't have Haste, and being able to doublecast Quick seems like it'd be incredibly overpowered.

Quick is great, but very expensive. He'd need to use Gold Hairpins or have someone throw out Elixirs or Dry Ethers every few turns to keep it up. Genji Helms have some useful status immunities and a ton more defense on the hairpin, so it is kind of a sacrifice to give that up. It doesn't matter a whole lot either way, though. That party should absolutely destroy the boss, especially if TK remembers the Elemental Power mix. It'll be much more of a challenge to make the poor guy seem like an actual threat in the writeup than it will be to beat him.

And Haste can be taken care of with Mix.

I do have a request if you haven't already beat the fight yet, since I keep forgetting to test it myself: Hit the first form with Kiss of Blessing before killing him to see if it breaks the fight. And hit the second form with it too to see how it changes him. I suspect most of the actual attacks come from the untargettable hands, so I'm curious if exploiting that glitch will actually make the fight harder. Just reload a savestate to fight him normally afterwards.

What glitch are you referring to, Spoony? I don't usually screw around with that kind of stuff so I don't know if I'm the best person to do the experimenting.

If there's something to show off though, I'll do it.

Kiss of Blessing (Maiden's Kiss + Holy Water) ignores berserk immunity. Being berserk prevents any action other than attacking, including things like in-battle dialogue and transforming into a new monster. Example. I'm wondering if they did anything to somehow prevent it or cope with the effect on the final boss here.

Oh, great, now I have a real reason to buy an iPad, besides just re-buying games I own on three systems already. Dammit, I liked having money! Thanks a lot, Squeenix!

No, you don't. Buy a Nexus 7 instead; it's $300-400 cheaper than an iPad and is, in general, a vast improvement over the iPad.

And it runs iOS?

De-lurking for the first time in forever to say - thank you Talking Time for translating this and being generally awesome. I feel like a kid in a candy store.

Question: does Blind eventually wear off even if not cured? My whole party got Flashed, I had no eyedrops or Esuna, but within 5-10 battles none of them were blind anymore. No deaths, either.

Android (ICS and Jelly Bean, specifically). Which Final Fantasy Dimensions will also be released for, if I recall correctly.

Moving to the next floor cures you of bad statuses. Nightingale and Chakra cure blind too.

Rumors abound, but no Android date has been announced yet. But it's out for Android in Japan, which equals a somewhat higher likelihood of a worldwide Android release.

ANYWAY: Ancient Cave, huh? Good stuff.

My dad has a Droid... maybe I can convince him to download it and then let me play it?

You've had this coming for a long time, old man!!



I resisted drugs but I just can't resist violence.





Old Man is not all that threatening and mostly uses his turns having your MP and lowering your defense. It's almost as if he's trying to soften you up or something.





He sometimes uses 1000 Needles on you, which seems to be his only damaging attack. If we hadn't taken the time to level up or master Monk, this would have posed a threat. As it stands, we can more or less ignore it. He also has sky-high evade to nullify our normal attacks.



Sensing more to come, we slam down (?) a few Dragon Powers just in case we need to hit something hard.







You mean, he wasn't an old man after all?!





Our true enemy appears!

Denied the possibility to let fall our vengeance upon the old man, we lash out in righteous anger!

Since we're dual-wielding and casting, that's nearly a metric fuckton of damage just on our opening salvo. This is going to be a cakewalk -- if only Zeromus hadn't countered our every move with Tornado.

When Krile's turn finally comes back around - she has White X-Magic but she is our only team member without Hermes Shoes - we do our best to pick up the pieces with Life 2 and Cure 3, but will she be fast enough to keep us on our feet throughout the fight?









Oh...oh, shit. Krile and Faris are zombies.

Well...maybe they'll hit Zeromus for whatever tiny bit of health he has left?



Yes! Come on, Faris! Use that Flare Sword!!



DAMN IT









That's just how it goes with this guy sometimes.

Let's try that again. With two characters slinging White magic we'll surely be able to outpace him...right?



This time Lena is packing White magic instead of Black, doubling up on our healing power. Other than that, our strategy is exactly the same: get high on Dragon Power and make our swords Flare up something nasty.







Things are looking pretty good! Butts got a few shots of liquid Dragon courage so he is hitting much harder than last time around, and Lena and Krile keep everyone topped off with extra-loving shots of Cure 3.







Zeromus nearly wipes us with another Meteor casting, but Krile turns it around on him by pouring a Resurrection potion down Lena's throat, who follows up with a double casting of Life 2. Our party went from the brink to full health in the space of two turns.





Zeromus pulls out more specialty gimmick magic (this one inflicts HP leak), but it's not enough to do the trick.

Once he gets low on health, he casts Protect in a futile attempt to save himself from the constant barrage.











It is not enough.



Zeromus is one mean son-of-a-bitch and you need good skills and a healthy dose of luck to take him down. Even with our decked-out party of killer ninja assassins, it still took us two tries to take him - that's a 50/50 crapshoot. Also, one must be careful not to discount the special secret method I used to made this fight look much easier than it actually is: I'm frickin awesome.

What do you have to say for yourself, Altoid?





That's what I thought.

Stepping through the teleporter...



What, we're not done?!



Hey, what is a save point doing down here?



If you like, we can pretend we changed the three chicks to Dancer and Butts to Magic Knight before we pitched the party tent, and that Sultan Butts enjoyed a fruitful evening of concubine entertainment.

Instead of an old man blocking our path, there is a mysterious flame blocking the stairs. See it? I wonder what it could be?



SHIT.

SHIT!

Okay, how the flying hell are we supposed to deal with this?!

To be completely honest with you, I had no recollection of this fight whatsoever when I started the LP. In my memory, it was take down Zeromus, and then game over. I think what must've happened on my previous playthrus was that I took down Zeromus and then immediately got game overs.

So maybe my memory wasn't so faulty after all.

Most strategies for taking down Omega revolve around having a party equipped with four Flame Rings, while Shinryu requires you have Coral Rings. Leave out one ring or the other and you're toast. It's almost as if the FFV designers had intended to throw them at you together to create the ultimate challenge, but nobody had the balls to do it until the Ancient Cave hack rolled into town.

So just how are we supposed to deal with these guys?







Since we only bothered to master Bard with one character (Lena), that means that someone else is going to have to take up the mantle of Bard. Since Butts also neglected to attend his chemistry lessons, that means he is the odd man out. He did manage to pick up Giltoss, so he's still a vital member of the team despite getting the loser job.





Lena's setup doesn't change much from when we fought Zeromus. Instead of !Dualcast she has !Sing.





Krile is our designated healer, so she gets the last pair of Hermes shoes.





Finally, Faris is going into the fight with Giltoss instead of Magic Sword. I've swapped out her second sword for an extra Aegis Shield I had lying around because she won't be using the fight command at all.

Now, where were we?

Ah, yes.

First thing's first: take Shinryu out of commission.



First, we hit him with Berserk just like last time, only this time we pull out a little trick I didn't show you before - Dark Sigh. Dark Sigh inflicts Blindness on the crystal lizard, meaning that he won't be constantly flooring our guys while we work on Omega.





Butts and Lena bombard the robot with a constant stream of Love, while Krile and Faris use SplitShell (a mix of Antidotes and Turtle Shells) to lower his defense. I have 10 Antidotes, so I go ahead and use a few on Shinryu for good measure. Then, I use a Dragon Power on Faris, and then it's business time.





Here's a comparison shot of a Giltoss from Butts and a Dragon Power-powered Giltoss from Faris. Omega hits us with his Wave Cannon attack in between, but Krile brings us up back to speed on the very next turn (with Cure 3 and Life 2).







Butts and Lena keep on belting out the tunes, while Faris slings coinage and Krile casts Blink to protect against the random Shinryuu attacks that get through. She also manages to finally get Haste on Faris.









With no more songs to sing, Lena mimes Butts for the victory.



Awww yeah.

We step forward into the teleporter, and...



That's it! We're out of the cave!





Those are our final stats, plus a little info on the dungeon run from the barrel in the pub.

This next section is boring exposition about the game. I spoiled it for you.

As you might have gathered - either through trying the hack yourself, or by noticing how much our game changed when we found good jobs early - that this game is in fact quite linear. Either you find the right treasures and survive, or you don't and get to restart. Then, you either pick the right jobs at the right time so that you have the skills you need for the stratums you pass, or you don't and you have to try again.

I think you can spot a losing run by Floor 20 - if you haven't found any of the powerful, must-master melee classes, you might as well hit that reset button. This is because even if you manage to pass the normal floors, you will probably get wiped by the boss floors. On top of that, if your dice don't end up sixes, you won't be able to take the final boss. The game is 90% luck and 10% skill, because no amount of skill will be able to get you out of a tight spot if you haven't found the necessary resources.

Needless to say, a winning run looks like Butts' adventure, and a losing run looks like most everything else.

So, everybody, what did you think of Final Fantasy V: The Ancient Cave? I made this thread because I wanted you to play it, after all! I hope you already tried it or plan to soon.

Bravo Tk, bravo! I won't be playing because I don't really enjoy rogue likes. But, I did enjoy your LP.

Thanks for the wicked sweet LP, TK. I agree with your assessment of the game, in that all runs are going to more or less converge once you have picked up most of the jobs and skills, but I find the first 20-30 floors super entertaining to play through. Figuring out how to keep your party alive with a limited set of skills is lots of fun, and getting out-of-depth equipment to mess around with makes it even better. It's true that the game has a few design flaws due to its origins as a ROM hack, but it's pretty amazing what it manages to do in spite of that limitation.

Why'd you bring three Mixers to Zeromus if all you were using was Dragon Power? You could have also doubled everyone's HP, made everyone immune to Tornado and several other status effects, Hasted Krile, and boosted Holy's damage even without needing a Sage's Staff. Also Lenna could have cured one of the zombies with Mix before they got a turn.

So what about that side area with the Lunar Ruins tileset?

It might be a planned feature, but right now, there's nothing to do there except listen to the music.

I know for a fact that when I beat this, it was Zeromus then exit. The Tag-team fight must have some unlock condition. Maybe you need to beat both of them on floor 88?

Giving the party Heavy status seems like a waste most of the time, but darn would that have been a good time. Does the element-absorbtion mix override bonemails fire and holy weakness? That would be an okay way to circumvent Zombie as long as they never died.
I'm not familiar enough with mix to know, which would cure Zombie?