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

Also, I thought the way the clock works is that going down a level adds 5 minutes, but only to a maximum of 10:00. So optimum clock management would mean that you should grind at least until 5:00 before descending.

A little present for our dedicated readers this morning. Version 0.4 is ready. Enjoy!

Excitement!

Vampire is actually bugged a bit in the GBA version. It only drains half of your missing HP here. I guess it's decent enough, but there are definitely better ways to heal and damage here.

Huh. Is that why you can also drain more HP from enemies than they have left in the GBA version?

I think you can always drain more HP than an enemy has. It's only MP drain that's limited like that.

I've beat this game five times and never noticed! How could I be so dumb???

Right in that last update I finished a floor with 0:08 and came out the next floor with 5:08. It must be true.

Floor 22 is a special kind of floor. There's no timer, and Zazaza reverts to normal walking speed. There are also these switches that move the platforms around. Our ultimate goal is to get to that chest in the center.

This is a Boss Floor, where you encounter special challenges that mark the progress of your descent. If you can get past these, it means your characters have been built well and you're ready to take on the challenges of the coming floors. We hit a boss floor earlier when you saw my team mop the floor with Garula. What I didn't tell you was that there are other, more dangerous bosses that I was hoping not to run into at the time.

This floor did have random battles, but I didn't run into any bosses. This might look like a great place to grind out the AP I need for Lance, but random battles stop appearing after a while. I was super extra careful this run and didn't even bother opening the chest, which is definitely trapped with a boss battle - one that I probably couldn't have won. So, I avoided even messing with the chest.

Not because I couldn't solve the platform puzzle. No sirree. Nope.

Hey, that can be today's FFV AC lesson! If you want to live long, be careful or fail to solve the puzzle on boss floors! Words to live by.



When our timer reappears, it is set to the full ten minutes.




We find Bard and a Wonder Wand.

How strong are our characters right now, anyway?




Here's the power difference between bare-fisted Faris and Partisan-wielding Zazaza. Krile and Lena are both somewhere in the middle, giving our team a current damage output of around 1500.

Faris still wins though for doing the Dragoon jump Superman-style.




On floor 24, we encounter our first trapped chest. Thankfully, these guys aren't quite strong enough to end our day. What's that? I had two characters with Flirt and didn't use it here for a free full-party heal via White Wind?

Quiet, you!



We take Hunter for our troubles. This might be a good class for one of our fighters after we're done with Dragoon. After all, we did pick up that Darkness Bow earlier and X-Fight is a long ways away.



Right across the way, we finally find Thief. I usually don't pay much attention to stealing, so if anyone has any advice about that I'm all ears. We find Mindblast in that chest on the bottom of the screen.



The fights here really suck, too, because we're fighting very time-consuming enemies from the Library. These fights go slow and don't give good AP...



but at least we see several Page 64s commit suicide by bouncing Level 5 Death off Zazaza's Reflect Ring.



We luck out yet again on Floor 25, where we get a full party heal, 1000 Needles, Ramuh, Ifrit, Golem, and a Gold Shield.



We even get a second full heal when after doing the AP grinding for this floor!



Halfway there!

Now I'm curious what the boss in the chest was. Any thoughts?

Well, I'll tell you... in spoiler form, just in case TK Flash does fight the battle in a different run of the cave. It's a Liquid Flame hand plus two Death Claws. And yes, it is in fact just as unpleasant to fight as any FF5 vet would think it sounds when going up against that enemy team with level 17 characters.

Wonder Wand? Game over. Just make sure you always have someone that can use rods and you'll never really be in any danger of dying again.

RE: Thieves Learning Mug and using that instead of Fight will get you a pretty decent stock of items. The extra consumables you get from that are pretty handy. Plus, Mug will avoid counters that trigger off the Fight command, like the ones Phoenix Tower and Great Sea Trench enemies use. That Wonder Wand will let you game the system if you really want to, though. Equipping and using it casts Return, which will restart a battle and also reset the floor's timer to what it was when you started the fight. So you can potentially keep stealing until you get whatever rare item you want. Ribbons and Aegis Shields are probably the only things worth that much effort, but it's kind of cheap and probably really boring to do that.

To clarify, it's not just a Liquid Flame hand. It's the Phoenix Tower Liquid Flame hand. So it has 9000 HP and heals itself every three turns for 1500 and has a 600 damage physical attack that paralyzes and some really nasty fire spells.

I beat it my last run.

Is this where we share our success stories? Because I just got Healing Staff and Elf Cape on the same floor.

Floor 44, Level 22, and no weapons above Main Gauche. Hitting the brick wall right now.

Version 0.5 of the patch is now up. Same Bat-.ZIP file, same Bat-Website! Ignore the .tbl file included in the .ZIP, incidentally; it's just there for anyone who wants to look at the ROM's text data in WindHex32.

EDIT: Small fix I just made; re-download if you downloaded before this edit.

EDIT EDIT: I'm on a roll. 0.6 is up now.

Okay, I give up. I've tried multiple times now to patch the mod to a headerless FF5 rom, and all I'm getting is the same old unaltered FF5.

It's important that you use the SRM file provided and load one of the identical save files. Otherwise, yes, it will just load up normal old FF5. Load the save and walk over the single desert tile until it makes an encounter animation ala the Phantom Village.

After I got the thing to actually work, I realized the emulator I was using was keeping saves in some out of the way directory, not checking for them in the same place as the ROM. Which is reasonable, but yeah, I had to change the preferences, then re-grab the save file (which it overwrote the instant I told it to look in the right place) but after that I was good to go.

Continuing our quest for Lance, we come across a Wind Spear and a Dark Matter. We also found a Kaiser Knuckle a few floors back.



Our dream finally comes true on floor 31, when Lena and Krile become our first party members to learn Lance!



SHOOOOOM!



I said fuck yeaaaah!



On floor 32, we find our first Ribbon!



Something about floor 33 gives me "back row" kind of feeling...



I knew it! This is a danged Boss Floor, and that boss is none other than...Jackanapes!

Holding our Morning Star, Krile is the damage princess for the fight. Ol' Jackie Boy bites it pretty quickly (he also is kind enough to give some of his MP to Lena).



The joke's on us though, this chest is empty! What about that other room that we went past earlier?



Why, it's a magic treasure trove! In this one room we learn Missile, Blizzara, Levitate, and Blink. Notice the two invisible chests on either end of the three visible pots.

We have to go back around and pass through the wall to get back to the stairs.



Everyone changes out of their sweaty, dank Dragoon armor for a breath of fresh air on floor 34, because they finally, finally, FINALLY learned Lance! Now we can feed upon the very creatures that torment our every step in this dank and ancient cave, and beat them back with our most powerful magicks without hesitation!

...If only we could learn some good spells. Here's what our magic list currently looks like:

White magic: Cure, Libra, Cura, Blink, Shell, Esuna
Black magic/Magic sword: Fire, Thunder, Poison, Sleep, Fira, Blizzara
Time magic: Slow, Regen, Mute, Levitate, Gravity, Comet
Summon magic: Chocobo, Silf, Remora, Shiva, Ramuh, Ifrit, Titan, Golem, Catoblepas
Blue magic: Frog Song, Mindblast, Vampire, Self-destruct, 1000 Needles, Missile
...and Mighty March for the Bard.

Gameplay-wise, we're currently wading through fights with groups from the Flying Ronka Ruins, so our party is more than a match for anything we're coming up against in random battles. Cura will be enough for our healing purposes for a while yet, and with Lance we don't have to worry about running out of MP, so what career paths should we send our four brave warriors on? Our survivability just shot through the roof, so let's hear what you want to see! We have everything but Knight and Freelancer.

If MP isn't an issue, at least one Blue Mage. 1000 Needles can be pretty awesome for damage.

You think your hot-stuff, being all Lancer'd Up and knocking out a Jackanape.

Well, FIE ON THAT, SIR!

You make everyone a Bard, PRONTO

shit
just when i thought i was safe
shiiiiit

Chemist!

I made two attempts to play on the husband's PSP last night and each time it froze up going into battle by the third floor. Meanwhile he has never had a problem. I hate PSP and it knows it.

Question: Are tents ever usable? Or are they the ultimate boobie prize of this game?

I have had trouble playing this game on the PSP as well, and eventually reverted to PC only after several lockups. Which was a damn shame, because my PSP time several times longer than my home console time!

As far as I know, you cannot use tents in the dungeon. You're better off sticking to Lance~

Give someone Mix, either Faris or Zazaza. Start moving the other one through the physical beatdown classes. Absolutely keep a Summoner around, and equip Gaia Gear on her for now if you have it, even if it's weaker than another armor you have. It boosts earth damage, which means big pain from Titan.

And there's one place you can use a tent/save point in the dungeon. You'll understand why when you see it.

What does Lance do?

Drains HP and MP for free based on your magic stat.

It drains HP/MP from the enemy.

You could also use Dance, although it's less reliable due to the randomness. (On the other hand, Dance's other effects are still good.)

Dance is good enough to keep you in out-of-battle cures but Lance is what you want if you're gonna use offensive magic regularly (especially summons!)

My longest run I got two Lamia's Tiaras (replaces confusion dance with extra Sword Dance) and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately all I excelled at was dancing (not even with good weapons!) so that fizzled eventually.

The gods of randomness are needlessly cruel sometimes. I got White Mage early on and enough good weapons to sacrifice one character's attack so I started training right away. By floor 10, Bartz has level 5 White but no white spells at all! No way to restore MP except a Dancing Dagger either.

Sigh.