FF The 4 Heroes of Light - Low Level Game Part 2: Sand Devil
9Read the details of the challenge here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrv23pHN-Ho
After Greaps, the party acquires the first crown (job): Wayfarer. It's not much of a class but as soon as we get it, we are able to escape from random battles, making a low level game possible. It often fails but soon enough we'll be able to learn a better ability for escaping from battles.
The party splits up at this point and will remain split up for a while. Guest characters keep joining, and they are mostly welcome, seeing how they represent more advanced classes that aren't available to the party until later.
The first guest is Krinjh, a Spell Fencer. I do honestly think Spell Fencer is a lousy class since you usually want to kill all the enemies in a single turn (in a normal game), and you need to first power up your weapon with the spell of the desired element, and after that you'll target one enemy anyway. But at this point in the game where the Wayfarer class is the only thing we can contrast to it, Krinjh kicks a whole lot of ass. He comes very well-equipped, he has the best melee proficiency with swords and he has great stat bonuses (each class in this game has its own modifier to the raw stat value including HP, Strength, Intellect and Spirit). In this boss battle, he can survive. And we do need him to survive, seeing how he can keep the permanent characters at a low level for a while longer by absorbing all the experience.
The only problem is that Krinjh leaves immediately after this battle, meaning we shouldn't give him any equipment that we intend to use later.
The boss is quite tricky because of the whole ending-the-battle-solo thing. One thing about him that gives new players a lot of trouble is his property of resisting all attacks, mainly physical but magical as well. He barely takes any damage at all.
The tricky to defeating the boss is to harden the sand protecting him with a Water-element spell. There is no easily accessible Water spell in the town before this dungeon, but if you enter the kingdom at night, you can sneak into one of the wings of the castle and loot its treasures, including a Water Tome, which is a key to winning this battle.
Now here's the problem: if we give Krinjh the Water Tome, he will leave with it, and we won't be able to make use of it ourselves later on. But if we give it to somebody else, which we do, we must hope that the battle goes in such a way that we harden the sand with the spell, then everybody but Krinjh dies, and then Krinjh is fast enough to kill the boss before the sand protects him again (seems to be after two turns).
I wasn't lucky here, as the boss refused to kill Brandt before his defence hardened again. I'd redone this battle many times before and without any success so it was time for plan B.
Antarctic Wind, which casts Blizzard, can be bought in the item shop before the boss, for 300 Gil. Water and ice magic surprisingly represent the same element in this game, kinda like they do in Chrono Trigger.
In the case that the first plan fails (which it tends to do), Krinj uses the item to crack the boss's defence and then finishes him with magic. I managed to pull this off nicely.
Another funny thing is that I lost the Earth Sword that the boss dropped. In FF T4HoL, every character has their own inventory storing a maximum of 15 items. If an enemy drops something during the battle, you can either leave it be by not hitting Distribute, or let the game automatically give it to the character with the least items in their inventory. Since Krinjh had less items than anybody else, he got the Earth Sword and left with it forever. lol. I'll never need the item though, but still it's quite ironic.