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

The secret best thing is that FFXI already has areas with randomly generated maps where you unlock your abilities over the course of the dungeon.

They share a slot, though, so you couldn't have both. Wedge is in that slot too.

And if you wanted ghosts you'd have to give up Strago and/or Relm.

Although if you're in there mucking about anyway it might be theoretically possible to mess with scripts (or write your own) to change which slot a character's initialization data is copied to...

So is this an appropriate thread for random strategy/observations etc on the hack? Should it be spoilered? There's a lot of this I want to talk about! (and big thanks to those who translated it).

I go away for a week and miss all of this awesome stuff! I'm not usually a roguelike fan, but given that it's Final Fantasy based and there's an English translation exclusive to this thread...

And this floor is how I learned that you don't actually get 10 minutes per floor.

I know right?

EDIT: Probably gonna lose this time since I am down to Krile, and BCrts with no phoenix down.

Down to BCrts with 32 hp. Ran into a monster chest with a skull eater in it.

huh, haven't been on this thread in a while

This is basically what I was saying.

I'd love it if people started talking strategy and observations about the hack, but please do spoil things that haven't been covered in the LP yet.

My stratagy so far is Make bartz Ninja with Dancing dagger + most powerful knife. Which moved to DD + twin lance so that I could cancel the drain when undead appeared. Finally it has become twin lance + chicken knife.

The others are support (one person with lance and white magic, and two with black magic. Krile has animal (for Nightingale = cheap if not chancy healing) and Farris has white lv 1 for some reason...

Currently on Floor 76.

From your spoiler text, it sounds like you might not be aware that you can change equipment during battle.

Item -> up -> A -> down -> scroll to new weapon/shield -> A

That sounds pretty decent, but what's your damage output like?

Guys, I am thinking we need to have Zazaza and Faris master monk before the enemies get too nasty and we need more skills than PUNCH!!! and LANCE!!!

Any objections? (I sure hope not)

Hey, so... derp time over here.

I'm having absolutely no luck just patching the Ancient Cave onto my FFV ROM. I have some kinda Lunar IPS dealie what says it's patched, but I just get eternal blackness when I try to boot it up in an emulator. The Ancient Cave Readme is all in a strange moon language too, so that's no help.

Help please?

Go for it. I keep having trouble by the 30s even with good starts so I'd like to see more from the "expert."

I feel like this romhack could use a thread for people sharing their experiences playing it (yes a third thread for one romhack.) Would a Let's All Play thread interest people? Perhaps not until TK Flash finishes one run (or dies) so it doesn't cramp his style, but if the enthusiasm's still high at that point it might be fun.


Two posts from the translation thread to possibly help: How-to patch guide and translated moon language guide.

Also do not use Lunar, In my experience it doesn't work. Use SNES ROM Utility: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/593/ and make sure you pick the no header option when you patch.

On the one hand, I wouldn't mind having everything put in this thread, just so I don't have to follow another one. People could put up short write-ups of their runs with the deaths in red like the Shiren fun club back in 2008.

Is there anyone following this thread that doesn't want the lower floors and their enemies spoiled before the LP gets there?

Never mind! New thread up in gaming.

Thanks! I've got it going now. Seems to have been the header that was messing me up.

Now, not that it's something I can't live with, but I'm going to assume that party members can't be renamed? Bloy, OWhWh and EzigY are cool if that's the way they gotta be.

Also, excellent job with the patch Sky Render! (and all you testers who I can't keep track of).

Somewhere in the translation thread (page 2-ish?) someone posted a new savegame with fixed names. Just rename it to match the name of your patched rom.

EDIT: I think Sky Render included a fixed-name save file with 0.6 as well.

No I knew (I would switch to the twin lance in battle to negate the dancing dagger.) It was that the twin lance was the most powerful knife I had until the chicken knife, but I had about using item effects in battle until around floor 73. Not that it was a good idea really.

But I did Switch back to the Dancing dagger combo as it deal about half damage but can drain HP which Bartz, and hit for over twice the chicken knife combo

EDIT: Game play spoiler

Anyone else ran into Boko yet.

Time to stop lollygagging around and get some jobs built up. We're going to need more skills than Lance to get through this thing, and some jobs are better off on the later floors than others. Summoner and White Mage are good for the whole ride (Lena and Krile will probably swap jobs after they master their current ones) but Zazaza and Faris need to get in and out of Monk as soon as possible.

Ideally, we would have started building AP much earlier, but this team can still go the distance...



because even our monks can heal themselves quite well with Lance, and...



our Summoner can sweep just about anything that the game throws at us if she has the MP to cast. Thanks to Lance, we can be sure she will.

Of course, from here on out it seems there are quite a few enemies who spawn with 0 MP, meaning that before long we have to take advantage of the fights where an MP-holding enemy appears and rob him blind. That's fun still to come.



We pick up a Twin Lancer, one of the best weapons for Ninja.



Then we run into a Lava floor. There's treasure in that there wall!



OH GOD IT BURNS



Krile immediately proves her usefulness by giving us the first of many full-party heals. She will recover that MP in the next fight or two.



Aaaand our durability just shot up a bit more! Here's Raise. Now anyone with MP can swap to White Mage at any time and get someone off the floor without wasting a precious Phoenix Down! Next to it, we find Firaga and Level 3 Flare. Blue Magic is the theme of this run, because I filled up half the list by the end of this update.



On the next floor, we find a Greatsword, Drain, and these guys that drop a tent for you and nothing else. They're easy fights and basically free AP, so we take a moment to farm them. Experience-giving mobs are better, so we don't linger too long.



After that, we find Requiem, Power Song, and finally get our Freelancer job back. We won't be needing this for quite a while now, having moved on after the first section of the dungeon. The other chest in this room had Blizzaga, and we learned Counter on the way to the stairs.



This floor confuses new players because it is one of the floors with only one entrance. You get out by coming the same way you came in. I remember one of my successful runs of this game had this floor come up for about half of the last 20 floors in the dungeon, where enemies are their nastiest. Needless to say, I didn't bother with...



the massive pile of treasure this room has in it! But today, oh boy, today we find not only Break and an Elixir



we find our very first Elf Mantle, too! This goes onto Lena immediately and it might just save our lives someday...



BIG BRIDGE BIG BRIDGE GET PUMPED



Here we are picking up Knight about 40 floors late! I really, really, really wish we'd found this instead of Dancer. We'll definitely be using some Knights before this run is through.



Definitely! The very next chest has Curaga, bumping us up to about as survivable as we can get!



The future's so bright, we gotta wear shades. Also we need the shades to look at Lena, who just found herself a glimmering shimmering Robe of Light!



The next floor is a Blue Magic bonanza with Aquabreath and Level 5 Death, and comes with Haste and Hastega as a bonus!



What does floor 44 have in store for us?



No timer means it's a boss floor!



We get to fight the dino brigade! The two in the front go down easily but the one in the back...



Well...



He gives us some trouble.

So, since I'm not playing this until I actually beat FF5 vanilla, I have to ask: does the correct music play?

It sure does. Even during battles. And it is awesome.

What I think is awesome is I get to listen to Gilgamesh's theme anytime I show up on the Bridge

B-but... you won, right?


Does Phoenix Down still work on it? Even the boss-level tyranno in FF5 could get Phoenix Downed.

Yeah, Phoenix Down still works. I assume Raise does too, but I've never actually tried it.

Careful now.

B... But that's common knowledge! Everyone always does that to that guy!

I killed it with Fire rod empowered Firagagagas

Because I already had Osmose/lance/dance and didn't want to waste an item.

Invisible treasure chests? Ew.

It's not like the series doesn't have a precedent for that. FF3 and 4 had tons of hidden items in the same fashion. Just look for invisible walls that you cannot touch.

It's also important to point out, and I think the LP didn't mention it, that the chests are still 'there' despite being invisible. You can't just walk through them and never know they existed, they'll obstruct your path.

Since the Bridge is only three tiles wide, it's easy to find the chests. So far in my experience with the hack all the invisible chests have been easy enough to locate.

I guess they're invisible because adding new graphics to maps was too hard or some such? Invisible chests are quite rogue-likey, so it fits, at least.