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

The game keeps secret track of how many times you've cleared the Ancient Cave; still not sure how. If you revisit the cave after clearing it, the Omega + Shinryu fight opens up after Alte Leute/Zeromus is defeated.

What opens up after you beat them(?!?)

I got them on my first run.

Holy Water (Holy Water + Holy Water)

Another Omega + Shinryu, of course!

It's Omega + Shinryus all the way down!!

/obscurejoke

It's pretty insane!

I don't think your comment is wrong (if you don't have long-term jobs for everybody by 22 with some decent equipment to go with you really are pretty screwed) but I've had super good runs which were almost totally luck of the draw based on what I found before 33. Ancient Cave also hits that roguelike sweet spot where every single chest is either feast or famine, with almost absolutely nothing in between.

Also this LP: Super good. Thanks!

This sounds like it could be Dissidia's plot...

I think the fire absorb should overwrite the weakness, but there isn't any way to get holy absorb. I don't remember if he even casts Holy, but I think Big Bang is just a renamed Almagest, which is also holy-elemental.

Is the likelihood of top-tier equipment higher towards the end? If seemed like you got a lot of critical gear on the last few floors, but it might just be that with all the jobs and most spells there wasn't anything else to talk about.

I know I've had runs where I have three Hermes Sandals by floor 8 (and still died horribly because nothing else worthwhile popped!)

Nah, it just seemed that way because I was skipping over so many crap treasures. The best stuff we found this run were, IMO, the Haste Shoes. Nothing else made as big a difference in the later fights - that one character without the shoes never seemed to come up! There were tons of holes in our gear list. Maybe it seemed like we had a higher chance of getting good gear because the jobs, skills, and magic were all out of the way?

Magic does scale with depth, though.

I'm fairly certain I've picked up the same spell multiple times in the same run as well.

I'm pretty sure that can't happen, but you can pick up items with the same name as a spell multiple times (Ramuh item, for example). If you use the item, you won't pick up the spell later, so it's a good idea.

That may have been it. I'm playing on PSP and haven't updated to the latest patch, so I always get confused when I get a MithrilH and it's a hammer rather than a helmet, for example.

This was an excellent LP.

A seemingly accidental part of the design that I really like is that even if you savestate your way through the entire game, if you're not properly classed and equipped you're still going to do horribly. Well... I'm not sure I actually like that, given how random drops are, but hey. The game still seems really cool.

As long as you have bards and either a couple of weapons that can hit the final boss for positive damage or enough mix items to remove his defense, you could probably cheese your way past the final boss. Getting there might be an issue, but I think I've always gotten summoner and a decent summon by the 60th or so floor, so that should be manageable.

If you hit every chest on the way down, you will probably have most if not all of the classes by the end, equipment is where more of the randomness enters in. However, being able to have almost instantaneous turns and being able to turn any decent weapon into a 6k or so hit via level + str song means you should be able to manage the final fight.


Regardless, excellent LP besides not showing off how bards break the penultimate fight (or really any fight where the enemy either has two forms or gets stronger attacks as it gets lower on life, such as with Omniscient).

My last wipe was on floor 72ish and summoner was the only job I didn't have yet. Also I'm pretty sure gear does generally get better the lower you go, but you can find out of depth stuff often enough in the early levels that it still ends up being pretty random (and you also still often find crap deep down).

I'm still having a lot of fun with this hack, pretty much just doing 11 floors a day at this point. Just cleared liquid flame and got !Dance for my Red Mage on my current run (!GilToss means any run with samurai before 22 should be able to win that one). Still haven't broken out the savestates, either...

The biggest issue for me is just how grindy it can get, though I'm also wondering how much that's actually required. I do wish there were a few more viable MP-restoring strategies too (that's generally the part of every run that's the most similar, since it's usually down to just !Lance and !Mixing dry ethers. Possibly Osmose later on).

It seems like there's potential for a really really compelling game here, held back by the fact that it's a rom hack and a few strange design decisions. Amazing just how close to really nailing the JRPG roguelike this comes. Is this an at all popular genra over there that we've just never gotten, it's pretty damn polished for a first attempt.

From day one, I never had any goal to "show off" any particular game-breaking strategy or bitchin' fight. I just wanted to go through the game and make a bunch of people want to try it.

Also, it was requested that I try hitting Alt Roit with a Kiss of Blessing to see if I could Berserk him. It didn't Berserk him or have any visible effect whatsoever.

There's a reason for that. Kiss of Blessing only bypasses immunities if the target is not immune to at least one of its effects (Berserk, Image, Haste). That version of Alte Leute is immune to all three, probably on purpose to prevent you from breaking the script that way.

Oh, neat. Curiosity satisfied!

you spelled alt roit wrong dude

It's probably supposed to be Alte Leute, but FFVA calls him Alte Roite so I just went with that for consistency.

Yeah, pretty much anyone even tangentially familiar with German realizes right away that he's supposed to be called Alte Leute (which pretty much means Old Man).

Alt Roit isn't that hard to spell, not sure how you keep getting it wrong.