Eventually I came back and went to town grinding for a good hour in my favorite spot. Got my four main characters above 50, mastered Life 3 and Ultima, and then cheated. =D
I put the Mog in my party and equiped Mog Charm which avoids random enemy encounters. Walked right up to the dragon, beat him easily, walked right up to the top of the tower, beat down the master magician and got the Gem Box item. What's the Gem Box you ask? Oh well it equips X-Magic. So... Gold Hairpin + Gem Box + Cysra (Terra) + Ultima + Haste2 = 'Cysra kills everything'; for half the MP. So yeah, Cysra pretty much started dropping 20k bombs on every mob for the rest of the game while the others hasted or healed the party. Lifnok got some X-Fight, mixed with the Genji Glove gave him 8 attacks per round but he's still weak in comparison. All his attacks combined on all mobs for around 12k usually; SOMETIMES 24k if the mob was weak to one of his claws. But Cysra is hitting EACH mob for 20k guaranteed, so at times she's throwing up 120-140k in total damage on the board. She's the first in six games that I've become really attached to, as far as characters. Gonna miss my little havoc wrecking Esper chick. It's really a shame that they limit damage to 9999. I mean if she's throwing quad nines on enemies in human form, what's she capable of in her Esper form??
Anyway, I proceeded to pick up Odin and convert him to Raiden. I tracked down the random encounter Doom Gaze in the sky and beat him up to get Bahamut and within Kefka's castle I beat the final two dragons to give me the final summon Crusader. All summons... CHECK! That's every summons so far in every game, let's keep it going! It was interesting though that this is the first game in the series where Leviathan was NO WHERE to be found.
So.... I get to Kefka's castle and it tells me to make three groups. FUCK. I decided to cheat a little again. =D I built a group of my second best guys and power leveled them to around level 38. They had like NO SPELLS, shitty armor, and shitty weapons but I had to get them to at least 2k just to survive some hits in the castle. For a while they were just impossible to play with, but after a bit I got in the groove. Got a dual wielding thief, a ninja star throwing ninja (loved that I could buy ninja stars at Item shops in this game btw), a weak ass impromptu healer, and my guy that learns Lore from mobs. My third party consisted of my level 20 dregs and my Mog, with Moogle Charm equipped. I went back to the castle and made my three parties. My main party would kill all bosses, my second party would just navigate the castle and hit switches but still be able to survive regular mob encounters and my third party could navigate and hit buttons w/o any mob encounters. It was a bit of a pain and probably took twice as long as the dungeon should have taken but it beat trying to get 4 guys to learn 20 Esper spells to become somewhat useful. My second crew even surprised me a little bit. I saved my game at one point and let them have a go at one of the Magic Statues right before the final battle and they actually beat her down nicely. Of course a good bit of it was luck, luck that she was casting her 4k dmg bolt on my 3k HP party member who just happen to absorb lightning damage lol.
Anyway I made my way to the top of Kefka's Tower and VERY nervously engaged. My heart dropped a little bit when it asked me to rank my party 1 thru 12. Oh god, please don't tell my they have to fight the final boss. That would be. Not good. I selected my best four warriors as the top four slots on a whim and threw the rest in randomly. If I couldn't fight with my four it wasn't going to really matter. The fight started with my top four luckily though. Cysra did her thing and the first part of the boss dropped in about two or three rounds. Cysra continued to do her thing for the second and third part. This was going to be easy! Then as the third part of Kefka died, his final action was a 9999 hit on Cysra. And I forgot to cast Life3 on her... Uh oh... The boss fell as my party rose up to face Kefka in his final God form and ... huh? What? Where's Cysra??? Why is Ikorid in her slot??? FUCK ME. I was SO tempted to just toss the reset switch right then and there but instead I snapped my end boss pic and gave it a go. Ikorid with his 2k HP and 1k swings for damage was a far cry from my little godly Esper girl, but I managed. I just kept chipping away with Lifnok's X-Fight attack and got a little Chain Saw help from Yorick and even a Fire3 here and there from Nazomi.
Eventually the boss went down but in retrospect I find it a little, well more than a little... I find it VERY ironic that I would go through the whole game without using Ikorid because I didn't like the character class and then at the very fucking last second of the game, SOMEHOW he manages to sneak into the party and out of fourteen characters I end up with Yorick, Ikorid, Nazomi, and Lifnok in the end and Ikorid gets to kill the fucking boss! Just crazy.
Casey, are you hacking my PS3 console somehow???
Overall, I absolutely loved this one. Great, great game. Right about now it ranks just below FFVII for me in the series, followed by IV, III, I, V, and II. I think at the end I'll rank them properly with a few comments on each a la IGN's article that I've linked to on the right. Pic of my crew stats at the end.
Next up... the mother of all RPGs, my favorite game of all time. It needs no further introduction, you know it, you love it... VII.
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