and suddenly i'm coming up to the point of no...thing to do except go to the final dungeon. this actually took a long time, i was really taking it easy and fighting about everything to keep learning magic spells, and now that i've learned more ways to *find* magic tablets i basically have an endless drip of them to keep learning, such that i won't even be done before the game ends...so once again i've cranked the battle rank really high and seen monsters i can't remember knowing about, as well as seeing esoteric materials in the shops i still can't even tell what they're good for.
i really do think battle rank advancing faster is like the #1 thing that would make this game better though in general. you basically have to fight without progressing the game to get to a reasonable point before finishing the game, which is so weird considering there are saga frontier characters where the opposite situation (fighting super huge amounts of battles and maxing the rank, particularly with riki and t260g) is a bit frustrating. i think also that the fact that some characters can go to the final dungeon and still keep fighting enemies that die in one hit is a huge problem, and a big reason that the final boss is such a notorious difficulty spike! also like 1/4 of the quests need to have much longer turn limits, but i hope that's a given.
at a certain point my goal became single-minded, because i'd spent all this effort learning blaster and realized i had never seen an item that *had* forbidden arts on it. you have to craft it! you can't make armor, nor use it as crafting materiel, so it took almost this entire file to learn most of the level 2 and 3 dark magic and get a malleable demonite item to make a staff with the skill on it.
then i went to a sidequest and, several turns into a boss battle i remembered struggling with on my first playthrough, i queued up a big turn with judy using a bunch of spells. the boss died without showing a red life point number. you can instant death him. so now i really think this game doesn't have any other instant death moves.
i'm going to blaster the last boss. and then when that fails a couple times, i'm just going to mash seal of the abyss until judy doesn't have enough LP to fight safely anymore. it's pretty fun to use all these rare and powerful spells that the other characters basically can't get access to, but i will also never do this again unless the remaster of this game buffs the progression curve for magic and the whole game a lot, so i'm really trying to milk it for all it's worth. although some of the frontier and minsaga new game + wouldn't be nearly as impactful in this game, spell carryover would let you have a broken judy for most of laura's quest at least, so that would be funny.
in judy's story, you have a bunch of mages, but you can't buy magic tools (in the terminology of SF2, i don't think they really have a collective name in this game); you can't visit the snow city or the one where ruby lives, and judy's family shop is closed because they're all out questing.
also, this wasn't true. they just opened very, very late in the game, nivacolina first but loch vaan just a couple quests later. if i hadn't drawn this file out so long after being strong enough to finish i would never have gotten access though. because of that i was so confused at first, thinking i must have somehow missed it the whole time, but loch vaan is right next to wanda so once that suddenly became open i knew that it was just a very strange design choice. which there's no shortage of in this game, but even on that scale it feels so easy to just not have happen, and even by the time they did i'd already learned how to actually make my own items. so whatever.
i feel like even as i remember and discover new problems with the game, i'm loving it and learning more about it than ever, and i'm looking forward to my last few "first playthroughs" a lot, even as i'm likely to keep playing even after that and redo some of my first few characters again too. i was gonna do armic next, but now that i've given in to playing wonders without doing them as final dungeons first, i might swap around, saving him for last and doing ruby's instead, since that's one of the biggest reasons i was putting it off...or ventus, but i think i'm going to need a break before going for another super "complete" run, and his is kind of famously one you can drag out for a really long time if you want level 5 panels or chances for other esoterica