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

You could call it differing playstyles, but I never consider my offenses good enough to let one character get away with contributing nothing, at least not until I get Lance (or some option to attack multiple enemies at once). You're basically handing enemy groups another turn to hit you with. Even if you do master White Mage by floor 15 or whenever, it's not like you're going to be changing the game with MP+10% and the best white magic spells in the game -- even if you picked up Holy it wouldn't do you much good without the MP to back it up.

So...no votes for Ranger yet? Are we going to try to do this without X-fight?

You can consider one of the things I said as a vote for Ranger, Ninja, or Mystic Knight. Whichever you have the best equipment for.

I'm willing to take risks on the early levels because not much is lost if I do die. I eventually got a Heal Staff, Cure, Esuna, and Dragoon so things are starting to look better.

Summoner, Ranger, and if it's not a lost cause, Red Mage.

Any particular reason you want to see a Red Mage? I mean, I just don't see the strengths.

Duel Cast. That's it.

That's a heck of an AP investment. Even X-Fight is significantly cheaper.

I don't want to discuss too much about what is waiting for us later in the dungeon, but I can tell you we will want to master some classes to get the stat bonuses. Couldn't that 999 AP for dualcast go into something more useful?

Spoiler lite:
That AP for dual cast would be better spent going towards mastering Monk and Black Mage, which will give our guys a lot more survivability with increased HP/MP when they end up back as Freelancers/Mimes for the showdown with the Big Bad.

Spoiler medium:
IIRC, the enemies on the lower floors give gobs and gobs of AP so mastering Red Mage might not be entirely too far-fetched.

Spoiler heavy:
Sephiroth kills Aeris and soylent green is people!!!

That's not as important as you might think. Last game I did, Lenna and Krile mastered Monk, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage/Summoner, Red Mage, and Mime. And got Dragon Sword and Blue Magic and wasted AP for the rest of the game in Mime after mastering it.

I really wasn't very excited about this at first (in part because I haven't played a significant amount of FF5 in 10+ years, and don't remember that much about the game now), but it is pretty great, isn't it?

I just finished my first attempt - a group of three kinds of Chimeras wiped me out on floor 44. I had some pretty good stuff, it seemed like. My biggest issue was that I had 10 Time magics (several of them from very early floors), but no Time Mage job.

Also, I was playing on PSP, and the only problem I had was that the world map screen was all black when I first loaded the save.

In my experience (and once when my husband was playing), the PSP always had fairly low battery charge when it locked up. It was plugged in each time but the battery was down to 15-20 minutes by then.

Changed my mind about job requests. Ignore Red Mage for now, aim for Summoner.

A little bit of early game Thief experimentation. Many enemies drop Potions, like you'd expect, but a few are worth stealing from.

Machine Traps have Ethers!
Poltergeists have Hi-Potions
Turtles have shells if you absolutely cannot have enough shells

Probably not worth the loss in offense generally, but if you are lacking for supplies early on, it's a nice boost.

This setup looks good. I say go with it.

Also, I have come to the conclusion that this is one of the few Final Fantasies where a ROMhack of this nature would be feasible.

I've been thinking about how it would work for other FFs.

FF4 - The GBA version let you swap your party around at the end. At the start of the dungeon you pick a party and go for it. Hope the treasure is kind. Unfortunately this just comes down to praying for good equipment.

FF6 - Somehow make special commands like Tools and Steal lootable, then customize every character like Gogo. Instead of looting individual spells, you're hoping to loot good espers.

Well, the obvious answers would be 10-2 and Tactics, although I have kind of a hard time picturing the former what with the lack of equipment.

Also, I never did get an answer, is there any sort of progress carry-over from one run to another, or is it just, run until dead/time's up, then start over totally from scratch?

Sorry about that. You start from scratch every run.

Death is the same as vanilla FF5, so the game does not so much as remember your failure.

There's a barrel that keeps your records, so it will actually remember your failures here.

FF2's leveling system could work with this. You only get weapons, but the focus is on gimping your stats as much as possible within the time limit. i will always love you ff2

Gimping? Really?

FFI - Choose your characters at the start. Items, equipment, and magic doled out randomly in chests. A bit simplistic, and the game is broken as crap, but potentially fun. The items which cast free spells are more or less straight out of a roguelike.

FFII - Endgame party. Items, equipment, magic, and stats doled out randomly in chests. SaGa games would actually work really well as roguelikes, given the penchant on semi-random character growth. And monster closets, the worst thing in FF2, is a pretty standard feature in roguelikes.

FFIII - Start with all Onion Knights. Items, equipment, magic, and classes doled out randomly in chests. This would be boring.

FFIV - Like Elfir said. This would basically be Lufia's Ancient Cave.

FFV - Pshaw! It would never work!

FFVI - Start with Terra only. Items, equipment, tools, and espers doled out randomly in chests. Party members can also be found randomly wandering the dungeon. Once you hit four members you can change up your party any time you meet a new member or at special points. Alternatively there could be a challenge mode where you pick your first member and have to use the first three characters you find.

FFVII - Pick a party at the start, stick with them to the bottom. Items, equipment, and materia doled out randomly in chests. I could see this being a lot of fun, actually.

FFVIII - Pick a party at the start, stick with them to the bottom. Items, equipment, magic, and GFs doled out randomly in chests. The Junction and Draw systems would make for an interesting twist, as it would not always be in your best interest to end a battle quickly.

FFIX - Start with Zidane only. Items and equipment doled out randomly in chests. Party members can also be found randomly wandering the dungeon. Once you hit four members you can change up your party any time you meet a new member or at special points. The skill system in this game would make for some nail-biting runs!

FFX - Full party at the start. Items, equipment, and special spheres doled out randomly in chests. I don't see this being that interesting as a roguelike.

FFXI - Pick a character. Grind for 250 hours.

FFXII - Full party at the start. International License Board. Items, equipment, magic, summons, and techniks doled out randomly in chests. All gambits are available at the start because seriously people.

FFXIII - ????????? pretty much everything interesting about character growth in this game is internal to the characters, rather than found in chests. I don't see it being a good roguelike.

OK yeah, Materia would be awesome with this setup. Probably something to be said for not randomizing weapons (or really weighting it) though since materia slots are Kind Of Important. FF7's maps are a huge mess though. Which I suppose would also hurt 10-2, but not as badly.

I would actually prefer FF7 as a standalone roguelike, rather than as a hack of the game, if only because the game's maps aren't really conducive to random selection the same way the 16-bit Final Fantasy games are.

Empty Sphere Grid. Some assembly required.

I'd play it.

And, of course, snip out all the damn cutscenes, but that probably goes without saying.

You're in luck!

Or I would be if it weren't hosted on Geoshitties, which has been dead for several years now.

The problem with starting with a completely empty sphere grid is that all of your characters would end up completely identical, because you'd never have a good reason to take any path other than the one that you were filling with stat-ups and skills. To get around this, you would need for the characters to start on isolated, linear paths that could only connect to each other using the special spheres. It might be interesting if certain common spheres were dropped in groups of three, so that everyone would get HP bonuses simultaneously, while others were dropped individually, so you would have to decide which character would learn Haste or Cura. If out-of-depth sphere drops happened like they do in this hack, though, you'd quickly find yourself back in the situation where you build one really good path and just funnel everyone on to it. It would definitely take some thought to balance it well.

I love the Final Fantasy VII, idea, though. It would be especially great if it kept the timer, since then you'd have to weigh the cost of using a powerful summon against the 1-2 minutes that it takes to play out. No spamming Bahamut Neo at every encounter!

FF8 would make an interesting Ancient Cave-esque candidate. No really, hear me out.

Most of the power-gathering in FF8 comes from converting items and drawing. But the game gets progressively harder as you level up, especially if you haven't done enough of the former two. Normally you can avoid leveling altogether by strategic use of Card, running, and lots of refinement. On a strict time limit, however, this becomes a lot less viable. You'd be forced to balance your efforts between keeping your level low and keeping your team competent. With random summon acquisition, it would be even more of a crapshoot since you wouldn't know what abilities you were going to have at any given time.

Just my $0.02 US on the matter.

Or just hard-code it so the heroes level up at the end of every floor whether you like it or not.

You can max out to level 99 in less than 24 hours so...no?