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

You should really play FFV before you try the difficult variant that relies heavily on your familiarity with FFV.

Somebody needs to monk it up, dude. Their passive skills are too crazy good and once you get Build Up you can swap it onto another class that deals high damage.

The craziest thing? Normally at this point Monk would be your high-damage output but those swords, man. THOSE SWORDS.

Oh yeah and I bet you'll want a Chemist too.

Pfft. I played Final Fantasy Tactics. I know about jobs. But I have no idea what all the exclamation points are about.

FFV is going to happen soon! Just as soon as I get done with VI. (Which I'd also never played until now.)

Red Mage, actually, seems like a worthwhile investment. Not because you want to cast all the magic, but because training up red magic means that once you DO have an MP battery of some kind, you can then start casting ZE HEALING or ZE HURTING with ease.

Then again, I gave up on my last FF5 run because everyone died to a level 5 Death and I didn't want to go farm levels solely to get around level multiplier nonsense. What do I know?

This was mentioned in the translation group recruitment thread, but I've made a quick-and-dirty ROMhack of the Ancient Cave if you want to play along.

It's at 0.2 right now. Just apply it to an FF5 ROM that already has Ancient Cave applied to it. What it changes just now is extremely minimal, and will mostly just make it possible to suss out the gameplay component for players not familiar with Japanese. No dialogue's translated or anything. And before you ask, no I can't fix the character names short of editing the SRM file that came with FF5:AC.

Two-weapon is the last ability a Ninja learns and therefore learning two-weapon means you have mastered the class and its stats become available to the Mime. Might as well get started, unless you want to grind 100 AP as a Berserker first to make up for only having knives to equip. Ninjas have one of the best passives, but are pretty much the worst equipped to use it.

A !Dancing Summoner with three Mimes can do a whole heck of a lot of petrifying, and you'd be amazed just how many enemies* are susceptible.

If you find some kind of golden AP farming opportunity, you could go for the Samurais final ability. Instant-death to all enemies sounds pretty good for a roguelike. It's over 800AP away though.
The same goes for the Summoner, free random summons is pretty good when your selection is small and has Catoblepas in it, but it's 750 AP away.

If nothing else, getting Counter out of the Monk will give you a good sub for any job that uses your current overpowered weapon.

I'll second basically anything SpoonyGundam has to say, it's all been good so far.

*and which enemies! No final-Meteor for you Mr. King Behemoth!

Also, Bare Fist can help make using some classes you don't have decent weapons for less of a hassle without sacrificing too much offense.

You WILL have a Dancer. Just don't use Dance vs undead because that's stupid. Preferably Zazaza because he has nice legs.

I think Red Mage would be a good investment, considering your selection of White magic so far, and you won't be giving up a sword arm like you would with White Mage. I forget all the spells you've got (maybe do a spell inventory some time?) but it's good enough to use Raise if things get tight.

You should also have a Monk. We want Barehanded and Chakra at least and Counter is dandy.

I don't think Mystic Knight or Blue Mage are worthwhile and keeping the second sword going is important. So stay put.

All those summons are exciting but we need MP first. When your Dancer picks up Dance, maybe switch to summoner so you have a nuke in case of emergency.

I just remembered that Icebrands are Knightswords, Knight class only.
That's roguelikes for you, his best weapon can't be equipped if he changes class.
Well, second best anyway. The Death Sickle randomly casts Death on top of its pretty nice attack power.

Nope, it's floor two of the Interdimensional Rift.

lol

So much for that! I'm okay with leaving two people as Freelancers (or Mimes if they can use them too.)

Mimes use knives, rods, and staves.

With no abilities, isn't a Mime just a gimped Freelancer?

They can still mimic commands!

Commands like... "Fight!" and...

"???!"

Version 0.3 of the Q&D FF5AC hack is up now. New changes:

* Small fixes caused by spacing issues
* Monster names added
* Summon attacks translated

Same URL as before.

EDIT: Please re-download if you downloaded it before I edited this message. I made a minor typo in the file that rendered all spaces incorrectly.

Serious question: Does a Mime have different base stats than a Freelancer? I know they inherit stats, but starting out.

I've never gotten far enough to get Mime but I thought they were Freelancers with magier stats.

No, their stat modifications are the same as Freelancers (both are at base with no modifications, but receive boosts from mastered classes, so at any given time both should have the same stats).

They're just used as mages in practice because of the three skill slots.

As well as because the equipment draw.

Do you guys want me to switch to the English version? I will try to patch this tonight, but I imagine it will break the savestate. Otherwise, I can switch if the unimaginable happens and Zazaza and crew bite the dust.

Stick with the Moon Runes until/if the crew dies. If they do then you can move over to English.

This. Switching mid-run would feel odd and with luck you'll survive long enough that the translation will be a bit more polished.

It's not going to break your savestate, but it will screw up the party's names. Just use the new save I put in the translation thread if/when you die, just to fix the names. Or you can rename the party yourself, if you want to keep your records. The barrel in the tavern will rename whoever is in the lead.

Most untranslated text will be complete gibberish too, but there are only a couple lines you haven't come across yet and Jaxon dumped the script in the translation thread, so it'd be easy to find.

Here are some screenshots, if you want an idea of what it looks like at the moment.

Sky Render: Why "Attak" and not "Fight"?

(not to criticize or anything; this is amazing)

I say stick with the Japanese, because it makes for a good reference.

Spur-of-the-moment decision; I started this thing at about 10AM PST today, so as you can imagine, I've made a lot of those so far. I'll probably switch it to Fight for 0.4 since that is both synonymous and a complete word.

I just played an hour of this. In English. Yesterday, that wouldn't have been possible. Is this forum awesome, or what?

Last time, we dragged our Freelancers much farther than could be considered prudent, and neglected to develop any support skills to help us on our journey.



Since we don't have much going on with job/equipment synergy, and we don't have very many healing options, we opt to start training in Monk and Dancer to pick up Martial Arts, Chakra, and Dance.



Dance immediately proves useful when Lena and Krile both heal themselves to full on the first random battle, and take out two enemies to boot!



Shortly after, we learn our very first skill - BuildUp! I can't really expect it to see much use, but it's our first skill and we should be proud of it.



Dancer continues to steal the show as Lena does the most damage of any attack we've seen so far - 768 with a Sword Dance. Bear in mind that we haven't found any good daggers yet, so imagine what her output will be like when she's holding something stronger. I think she was using a Mythril Knife here.



We grind on floor 18 until the clock nearly runs out. It said 0:08 when I went down the stairs, so we barely made it. At this point, we've already learned Flirt with both Dancers.

Since we get ten minutes per floor, we should have plenty of time to grind our our skills, don't you think?



WHAT

WHERE ARE MY OTHER FIVE MINUTES

Yes, you see right. We had five whole minutes shaved from our time for screwing around too long on the previous floor! Now, we learn another important lesson: Don't dally! Staying too long on any floor gives you a time penalty on the preceding floor!



We got two Blue Magic spells on this floor: Self-Destruct and Vampire. We also got a certain job but I'll get back to that later.



Since Krile and Lena managed to pick up some MP along the way, we swap them over to White Mage periodically to cast Cura on the party. We're still shooting to add Dance to our skill list, though, so we swap them back to Dancer before we continue exploring.



Floor 20 is another chest/healing pot floor!



This floor was another bonzanza, and dropped a Reflect Ring, a Dark Bow, Comet, Chocobo, Beastmaster, and two hi-potions into our hands.

Unfortunately, nobody ever learned Dance or Chakra, because it turns out we have bigger fish to fry.



We picked up Dragoon back on floor 19, which has the first piece of our Descension Kit. I was really hoping to get this sooner so we could start training immediately - in my practice run, I got Dragoon on floor two - but sometimes that's just how the dice rolls. We won't be changing classes until we get Lance, but once we do, we're free to really start building our characters towards their ultimate forms.



In a stroke of double-plus good luck, we find a Trident and Partisan right on the next floor, not to mention Fira and Geomancer! Here's Zazaza showing everyone his new Partisan! Nice Partisan dude!!!

Now, let's keep treasure hunting and hopefully we'll survive long enough to unlock Lance.

I feel like Geomancer would be potentially very useful in this game.

I don't fully understand the clock. What happens when you run out of time, and how exactly do the time penalties work?

Also you find Blue Magic, too? That would make me completely rethink it's usefulness! I always hated having to lug around Learn in a slot to get anything out of it.

If I've learned one thing from my FFV4JF run, it's that Blue Mage + Vampire is an extremely good combination. Full heal plus decent damage for only 2 MP? It's a steal!

My own Ancient Cave run is currently sitting paused at level 17 or so (so addictive). I made a mistake a few floors back, switching my two Freelancers over to Mime because I thought Mimes could use every weapon type and completely losing access to a decent whip and spear in the process. I also wanted to get some free cures in using Mimic, but that hasn't been quite as useful as I hoped it would be. Not the end of the world, though, because before long I found Monk and it turns out that I can do more damage barehanded than I can with any of the weapons that I've found so far. So now I've got two people working on Monk with some basic white magic on backup, Faris learning White Mage with a morning star in the back row and Bartz working on Mystic Knight with an Ancient Blade in the front. My offense power is comparatively strong, and Lenna at least is so well armored that she takes 0 damage from many attacks. We got a party heal from the jar in the wind shrine a few floors back, so everyone has 20-30 MP to play with for healing. Still, I'd be very happy to find Dancer or Ranger soon, since both offer free ways to restore HP and/or MP.

Man, this game, you guys.