Journey of the Five Battle Logs

[Lijj]

spoiler

So I'm at the Sephy battle.. he annihilated me (both of us) in two moves. I think I took a total if 19 of his HP.. I thought it was one of those battles where you're SUPPOSED to lose.. ugh so hard. I'll try again later though

[The Damned]

(Ugh. I think I spent a tad too long on the annotations for vids #3-8 since no one said anything about #1 being overdone or not. I swear, those past eight hours....)

For the record, I still blame Raven.

Regardless, videos #3 & #4 now have annotations to explain my idiocy and such. Videos #5-8 also have annotations for such things, though I didn't have to re-post those...which is why I have to post/link to them now:


5. FFT Journey of the Five, Ch. 1 - v1.3: Nu Mou Named Babus: Still Noisome - Story Battle 4 [21:22]

6. FFT Journey of the Five, Ch. 1 - v1.3: Sungoggles at Night - Random Encounter 1 [11:00]

7. FFT Journey of the Five, Ch. 1 - v1.3: Babus's Baby Brother Bruno Battles Badly - Random Encounter 2 [10:11]

8. FFT Journey of the Five, Ch. 1 - v1.3: "Nature's Wrath" Indeed - Story Battle 5 [34:08]


Yeah, I decided to change the title form a bit to be more clear after I realized Youtube massively fucked-up the order of the 99 FFT ARENA videos I have with me being seemingly unable to change the order. Good times.

"Tough. Blame yourself or RavenofRazgriz."

I laughed too hard at that.

Glad someone got a laugh out of that silly little joke/reference.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

You'll be blaming me a lot more soon, don't worry.  Up to Araguay Woods is just the warm up.

It's good to see that most of the people recording playthroughs aren't having a particularly difficult time with the game though.  It's not meant to be that cruel and unusual yet.

[Durbs]

yet.

[brittmarv]

a wet dog reference, a Cujo reference, and then a bloody man runs up panting...


crap

edit: lantern carrying lizards eh? awesome. actually, I always wondered why FFT didn't have those in the first place. same thing with moogles and cactuar.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

edit: lantern carrying lizards eh? awesome. actually, I always wondered why FFT didn't have those in the first place. same thing with moogles and cactuar.

All of the playable races in FFTA/2, XII, etc. are supposed to have gone extinct along with most of their technology by the time FFT occurs.  That's why they're not present.

Yes, we know there are Nu Mou in Chapter 1.  Yes, what I just said means Nu Mou are supposedly extinct.  This is not a contradiction.

[brittmarv]

All of the playable races in FFTA/2, XII, etc. are supposed to have gone extinct along with most of their technology by the time FFT occurs.  That's why they're not present.

Yes, we know there are Nu Mou in Chapter 1.  Yes, what I just said means Nu Mou are supposedly extinct.  This is not a contradiction.

Eww.. forgot about the Ivalician Clothed Moogle Race. Not my favorite direction for a FF Staple to have taken. I blame it on FFXI, naturally, for starting that trend.

Secret of Mana/FF5/FF6/FF7 Moogles were awesome.

Be sure to leave some feedback on the event proceeding the next battle ;P Worked quite hard on tht one.

spoiler

Well, the entirety of everything that happened after Ganon 1.0 was awesome. The scenework felt professional but had that touch that only homegrown can give. Entertainment level was on par with the top tier of squaresoft classic rpgs and much better than most modern rpgs with their fancy CGI. Snake..    Snake..     Lol. You packed a lot of good jokes in there.

As for the fight with Ganon 2.0.. man oh man. It just never ended. I was running on fumes toward the end. Why oh why did I take away Chakra from Ramza? Sure, having 3 units with Trip Up seemed brilliant at the time. Too bad Ganon likes to fly from one end of the map to the other just out of melee range.

My strategy quickly dissolved into Aim Longbow shots with Link, Shocks from Dante and Snake ( when he wasn't Full-Lifeing ) and Ramza spent all of his time either Yell'ing at people or Wishing they would stop falling on their faces. As for Cloud, well he made a good doorstop and not much else. I really should have invested in some more limits besides Braver, Cross Slash, and Finishing Touch. Oh, and what's up with Sephiroth and (I'm assuming Ganon) being Cntr-Deathblow proof? Bad! But I guess it is fair. HP and Mana can easily become Cloud's most useful stats  ;)

Mustadio redeemed his admittedly poor performance from the previous game. ( Though I used to love the elemental guns, I'm not gonna lie. Snake needs elemental guns! )

After all is said and done, I am dissapointed that I blew all my savestate slots and only kept one data save. None of which can take me back out to the world map. I won't know anything about those Toads or what marks lie beyond until Chapter 2. Unless they are Chapter 1 only.. Oh man.. did I miss out on them? That really sucks.  I am sort of a completionist if you can't tell.. I don't like to leave any stone unturned.

Well.. that's that.. Man, this is so not the right thread for this but we kind of started up a side conversation in here. Lol.

[CT5Holy]

Part 1 of my playthrough
I'm definitely enjoying it so far!

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Brittmarv, I have a memory card I could send you but it's my difficulty testing card, meaning you'd be Level 5 @ just before end-Chapter with almost 0 skills.  You'd have to redo all your grinding so I dunno how much time that actually saves you.  Good to see the Chapter boss still gave you quite a bit of a challenge even with all the skills you've ground up.

-

CT5, that's some rough beats on the second fight.  Looks like the changes to Bartholume worked out well enough since he was able to get in the clutch revives and heals without wasting all your Items.  Hopefully the changes to the fights you're about to go into work out well for making them a bit less rough, too.

[brittmarv]

Brittmarv, I have a memory card I could send you but it's my difficulty testing card, meaning you'd be Level 5 @ just before end-Chapter with almost 0 skills.  You'd have to redo all your grinding so I dunno how much time that actually saves you.  Good to see the Chapter boss still gave you quite a bit of a challenge even with all the skills you've ground up.

Sounds good, that'll help me finish up the wiki!

[CT5Holy]

Sure hope so, Raven =P

Part 2 will be up in 1-1.5 hours.

[CT5Holy]

Something happened to the vid for Part 3 (corrupted, maybe? I suppose I could try to upload it onto youtube still), so I'll try to go over what happened here.

spoiler

Zirekile Falls: Resets: 0
Goodness, monsters are scary! Flotiball's Wing Attack adds Slow, the Toughskin's Headbutt adds Paralyze, and even the Piscodaemon's Immobilize from Tentacle was a bit of a problem! The Toughskin sure felt scary, and I was considering focusing it down first, but then I noticed it had 4 speed so I left it alone. Good thing I did too, since innate DefUP and MDefUP + Damage Split = too many turns spent on Toughskin had I chose to focus it down first. I instead focused on the Flotiballs first. Managed to drop one pretty quickly, but not before it Slowed one of my units. So, even though I had killed a Flotiball, I was still in an iffy spot. Dante and Snake were Slowed, Cloud was Paralyzed, and HP totals were at 30-60% for everyone. Ramza might've been a bit healthier at around 80%. I soon put the other Flotiball into critical, so it began to run away, until Snake chased him down (Snake was also in critical, and I was planning to have him run away. Then I noticed Snake could move next to the Flotiball and kill it. So I did.). At this point, the Piscodaemons were in my face, but the Toughskin had retreated to the bridge. He wasn't out of the fight though, thanks to Rain of Stone, which is quite nasty! Not insane damage thankfully, but plenty for anti-sandbag + be threatening. I slowly pulled myself out of the hole as I finished one of the Piscodaemons, and Crystals also started to appear. Wish is awesome. Got pretty lucky in that Nature's Wrath didn't trigger too often, but even so, when it did, it was solid damage. I played around it by making sure severely injured units did not attack the Piscodaemon, such that Nature's Wrath + Tentacle, or even just Nature's Wrath would kill the attacking unit.

Araguay Woods: Resets: 0
This was a good battle. I thought for sure I would lose, but perhaps I made that judgment prematurely. The rangers went first and did Aim and Venom Strike, severely injuring Cloud. Poison only made things worse. Shock was also nasty. I was able to drop the Squire fairly early on, which definitely made things manageable. Poison made things awkward - I didn't want to PD or Wish, so Cloud stayed down for a good portion of the battle. The key moment was when I went to kill the Chemist. Dante's Stinger + an attack from Link brought the Chemist decently low - 1 more attack from Link would drop her, and since I had already killed the Squire, that meant no revival for the enemies. Link and the Chemist were really far away though; none of my other units were in range. Snake's turn came up, and he landed a clutch Move! on Link, which let him finish off the Chemist. Things were still kinda dicy, as everyone's HP totals were rather low, but I pulled through. (Ack I'm missing a lot - I'll upload the vid tomorrow, hopefully it's viewable)

Random battle at Araguay:
It was the 2x Bomb, 1x Grenade, 1x Explosive + Guest Chocobo. The Bombs kept healing each other, which was annoying, but eventually managed to focus them down, one by one. Choco Cure was quite helpful. Oh, made Ramza a Chemist at this point.

Barius Valley: Resets: 0
Whoa Tesnya does a lot of damage. Agrias was awesome though, go Stasis Sword! Ramza was just on rez duty the whole time, basically, mostly to revive Cloud, but I did revive the female bandit once or twice. Dropped the Wizard early, which helped, as that put the AI in a rez loop. Ramza had just enough Wishes to keep people alive long enough to get the job done. A Condemn on the Item Knight was nice, and Ramza also got Tesnya's Crystal! So that was cool. There was a scary moment when Tesnyz Charmed Agrias - she then used Sacrifice to heal the Ranger who was just brought up with a PD, but still managed to fight through that.

[brittmarv]

Sure hope so, Raven =P

Part 2 will be up in 1-1.5 hours.

Elric gave me a compiled list of JoT5 Videos and thus the Wiki now has a Videos Page.

http://jot5.wikia.com/wiki/Videos

You are on it, of course. I just added your second video as well. If anyone has any videos, feel free to edit the page yourself. Just click Edit and then click Source. That way you should be able to easily see the format Wikia uses to post links, and you can update there as you go. If not, I will still try to keep it updated.

Good luck man glad to see you are coming along quickly

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Have you tried the second Mark yet, brittmarv?

(Hue.)

Looks like you're coming along well though, CT5.  All the small edits I've made to get the difficulty curve more consistent and not particularly gruesome early on seem to be doing exactly as intended.  Good good.

[brittmarv]

Have you tried the second Mark yet, brittmarv?

No but I can jump on that real quick.

On a side note.. After glancing over a few videos, I had to chuckle when I realized I wasn't the only one who used Snake as an invisible barrier in the earlier battles to keep monster groups isolated ^_^

spoiler

especially on zirekile falls bridge.

EDIT: Yep I handled up on that second mark. Was a lot harder than the first mark. ( For a level 7 group, at least ). I had to use (read: abuse) items to do so. I gave up my first attempt once I ran out of steam because I had only brought 1 Phoenix Down. After hitting the item shop I came back with a vengeance. I think i ate 2 Ethers and 5 Phoenix Downs, but was able to control the fight much better. I think I had a better start as well, and that always helps.

spoiler

And I won back the phoenix downs I used up too so that's a perk.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

I'm kind of surprised you beat that second Mark on that memory card, unless you modded it to open skills or did some grinding or something.  The second one you did is supposed to be on par with the hardest battles in Ch1 for as simple as the battle setup was.  I suppose after going through Ch1 you'd be experienced enough at managing your AoEs and such to handle that fight, since it's not too bad at low levels.

[brittmarv]

I'm kind of surprised you beat that second Mark on that memory card, unless you modded it to open skills or did some grinding or something.  The second one you did is supposed to be on par with the hardest battles in Ch1 for as simple as the battle setup was.  I suppose after going through Ch1 you'd be experienced enough at managing your AoEs and such to handle that fight, since it's not too bad at low levels.

No grinding or modding. I had actually intended to hack the units to be on par with my old save but decided not to once I beat the first mark. That fight, I believe, may have actually been easier because of the low level of my team. The monsters hit points were at a proportionately lower standard than my damage output essentially because it was monster level vs weapon tier. On top of that, I have been playing FFTactics since it came out, and rpgs in general since Final Fantasy 1 and Dragon Warrior came out in the 80s. Like yourself, I've also created a few games in my time and I tend to look at things from a design standpoint, which makes one experienced at finding good strategies as time goes on.

Don't worry about the fight - It is plenty hard. It would be a lot tougher at level 15-25 range because it is gonna be less probable to ensure 2-hit kills on the monsters. In addition, the proportion of HP gained from the available armor is gonna become smaller as level increases. Regen at level 7 with the available clothing was hitting for roughly 2/3 of the damage of the ranged attacks. It did a lot for survivability.

As far as the biggest strategy point for that fight for me:

spoiler

Keep chicken-boy and his phoenix downs away from those corpses as best you can (unless you can roughly assure that the resurrected monster's turn isn't going to come up any time soon. then, it may be smarter to trade him 1 turn for 1 turn and kill the chocobo with your weakest unit), and don't chase after a solitary fleeing chocobo if his hps are low enough that Choco-cure isn't gonna put him back in the fight for a few rounds.

[CT5Holy]

Part 3! yayyyy

well, now you guys get a more in-depth view at what I wrote up earlier =P

also added vid to wiki

[Barren]

Now for the long awaited Part 7 of my Walkthrough!

FFT: Journey of the 5 Walkthrough Part 7

[CT5Holy]

Part 4 will be up soon, added link to wiki.